


Waterbridge

by pointerbrother



Category: One Direction
Genre: Angst, Boarding School, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Minor Character Death, Porn Watching, Recreational Drug Use, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-03-12 06:51:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13542009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pointerbrother/pseuds/pointerbrother
Summary: When 17-year-old Louis' less than loving dad ships him off for a year at boarding school, Louis really doesn't know what to expect.He definitely doesn't expect Harry Styles.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to note that the time period in this "universe" is intentionally ambiguous, which is why certain behaviours are considered "acceptable" in here, which obviously wouldn't be today.

It’s late when they arrive. The sky is a pitchblack blur behind the rain whipping the windshield. They’ve been driving for hours, or more, Louis’ lost track of time after dipping in and out of sleep too many times. All he knows is when they left they were surrounded by row-houses and convenience shops, chippy’s and concrete and razor-headed bomber-jackets, and now— now they’re not. Louis can’t see much, even as he pulls his sleeve over his hand and wipes a clear circle in the fog of the passenger-seat window, but that tells him enough in itself; they’re far, far out of the city.

“We’ll be there in a minute,” his dad tells him, as the first word spoken in over three hours. His dad never was much for talking.

“All right,” Louis says, and leans his face against the cool window again, just as the sky lights up in a flash, illuminating every little raindrop fleeing down the foggy glass.

Soon after, as the sky roars, Louis catches the first glimpse of light in a very long while. It’s yellow, a tiny blurry speck in the distance at first, but soon he realises what it is; a window. He can’t make out the building before him, even as he feels his dad swerve around something in the gravelly driveway, maybe a fountain, maybe a statue portraying the school’s founder. When they park, the headlights point toward the front steps, stretching wide enough to fit at least twenty grown men at once, and tall enough that Louis can’t see the top of them at all.

His dad cuts off the lights and everything goes black again.

“This should be it,” he says, unclicking his seatbelt, “come on.”

He leaves the car and Louis unclicks his belt too, slowly, before he steps out into the stormy night. His dad’s already unloading the boot, not that there’s much to unload; all of Louis’ belongings, or at least the one’s he needed, fit fine into a large-sized duffelbag and the backpack that he kept between his legs all throughout the drive.

He tugs it over his shoulder and waits for his dad to overtake him with the big duffel before moving toward the massive, rain-plastered staircase before them. He hasn’t looked up yet. He hasn’t dared to.

He does now.

He tips his head back far as it goes, raindrops springing into his eyes, but he just blinks them gone. The building is massive. It’s a greyish, maybe once white, colour, like the front steps, and it’s at least four stories tall. Most of the windows are darkened, but the two on the sides of the front door are lit, that yellowish light Louis caught before.

“Louis!” his dad calls out, many steps above him already, “come on, lad, what are you standing there gaping for?”

Louis ducks his head and begins to run to catch up to him, backpack jumping against him, sneakers soaking as they splash on the sailing wet steps. It’s a long way to the top and by the time Louis finally reaches the large dark-wood door and wonders whether to ring the bell or use the massive golden door-knocker instead, his dad’s fallen several steps behind.

He waits.

“Why haven’t you rung the bloody bell yet?” his dad pants out, reaching up to him and dropping the heavy duffel to the spot of dry ground before the door, “I’m running late, for Christ’s sake.”

“Sorry,” Louis mutters, as his dad presses the doorbell hard and for far too long considering most of the students, and staff, are probably asleep at this time of night.

They wait in tense silence.

Not three full seconds have passed before Louis’ dad is moving to ring the bell again, but then they hear the lock rattle. The door opens with a slow creak. Behind stands a small, red-haired woman, mouth a tight line, eyes sharp and dark.

“Tomlinson?” she asks.

Louis glances at his dad, who answers for him, “yes, that’s us. Mrs. Till?”

“Miss,” she corrects, shaking his hand, and then turns to flash something resembling a smile at Louis. “You must be Louis?”

“Yes,” he says, shaking her hand, “Louis Tomlinson, ma’am.”

“Well, come in, Louis Tomlinson,” she says, moving back so Louis and his dad finally have a chance to step past the threshold. “Welcome to Waterbridge.”

They step inside a massive foyer, with grey-brown slate-floors and pine green walls, all panels deep dark wood. A balcony towers above them, balustrade the colour of the panels, two identical staircases on either side of it, curving in towards the middle of the foyer. And, in the middle of the foyer, stands a statue. A statue of a short, square man in pointy-toed boots.

“Angus Waterbridge,” Miss Till says, catching Louis looking, “the school founder.”

Louis nods. Miss Till clacks her heels across the stone-floors until she reaches a set of two green velvet-couches, a small console-table in-between. “Would you like to sit down while your father and I go and deal with the paperwork, Louis?”

It doesn’t seem like an offer as much as a politely veiled order.

Louis takes a seat and Miss Till presses open a double-door in the wall just beneath the balcony, gesturing for Louis’ dad to walk through. “We’ll be back in just a minute,” she tells Louis, and then leaves him alone with his drenched-wet backpack and duffel.

A minute turns to two, turns to three, turns to at least half an hour. In all of that time, not a single person walks through. They’re all asleep, save for Miss Till and his dad. Louis doesn’t get up and have a look at any of the portraits decorating the walls or the doors leading to unknown places, even if he is a bit curious. It’s still storm-weather outside and he’s beginning to feel a little bit scared. This place looks like something out of a horror movie, at least when he’s sitting all alone, every move of his foot echoing loudly, the only light in here the heavy chandelier hanging far, far above him. It’s too quiet in here.

It’s too quiet until, suddenly, he hears footsteps.

They’re not coming from the hall Miss Till and his dad went down, they’re coming from farther up. They’re coming from the balcony, which Louis is sitting under, and— and they’re coming down the staircase. They’re not loud or heavy in any way, but rather suspiciously slow, careful, like they’re actively trying not to let themselves be heard.

When the footsteps reach the bottom of the staircase, which is within Louis’ line of sight, so does the boy they belong to.

He’s tall, slim, with a thick head of curly dark hair. He’s wearing a dark-green sweater and joggers, sneakers too, like he’s going out for a run in the middle of the lightning and thunder. He stops at the final step of the staircase, staring up at the chandelier, hand cramped round the bottom of the railing. Then, suddenly, he makes a run for the door Miss Till and dad walked through. He’s so fast and determined about it that he never sees Louis at all, but Louis catches a glimpse of him. His skin is pale, much too pale, lips frayed and eyes underlined with deep dark bags. On the right side of the front of his sweater, there’s a dark-red ‘W’. 

He’s gone in an instant and, when Miss Till and Louis’ dad arrive back five minutes later, he’s never mentioned.

“Well, lad,” Louis’ dad says, slapping a hand onto his shoulder in the front door he’s made an immediate beeline for. “I’ve got to get going, I’m running very late.”

If there’s one single phrase Louis thinks he’s heard more than anything else his entire life, it’s that.

“Of course,” he says.

His dad gives his cheek an affectionate pat. “You be good. I’ll see you soon.”

If there’s one single phrase Louis thinks he’s been disappointed by more than anything else his entire life, it’s that.

“All right, dad.”

His dad gives Louis’ shoulder a last squeeze, then Miss Till, who’s waiting quietly by the statue of Angus Waterbridge, a goodbye, and then he turns around and leaves.

Louis watches him disappear into the rainy night.

“You all right?” Miss Till asks him when he turns back and lets the door close behind him, her voice that of a person who’s been told over and over again to be more concerned with other people’s feelings than what’s natural to her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Louis replies without having to lie. He’s never anything but apathetic about watching his dad leave anymore. It’s no use, anything else.

Miss Till takes his backpack, at which Louis is happy because her frail figure looks as though it’d snap right over if she tried carrying the duffel. It’s heavy on himself too, mostly from how wet it is, and it’s left a puddle on the floor where it sat.

“Come along,” Miss Till says, not waiting to see if he obliges.

She opts for the same staircase as the one the curly-haired boy came down, and Louis follows her wordlessly. The first floor looks somewhat similar to the one downstairs, floors cold stone, walls dark green, but there’s nothing much to see but doors on either side of the staircases.

“Left door leads down the hall toward our library and exercise room,” Miss Till tells him, “right leads to the kitchen and dining hall.”

When he asks her about the school, she tells him there’s another building diagonally across from this one, which Louis didn’t see in the dark.

The second floor looks the same, except it has dark-red carpeting. “On the left, all of our year ten boys reside,” Miss Till explains, “on the right, all of year eleven.”

She continues up the next identical staircase and Louis takes a deep breath before hitching the duffel up and following. The next floor is identical to the one before. “All of year twelve on your left. Common- and activity rooms on the right.”

She never actually shows him through to any of those places, but Louis doesn’t mind. It’s the middle of the night and he’s carrying a bag that feels as heavy as two of himself. If no one gets assigned to tour him in the morning, which he seriously doubts would happen, he’ll just have a look around himself.

Finally, they round the fourth and last floor. It looks identical to the past two.

“Final stop,” Miss Till says, stopping and turning to look at him, forcing another small smile, “on your left we have the year thirteen dorms. On your right we have the rest of the year thirteen dorms, as well as a small private common room for the last-year students. Like yourself.”

Miss Till looks at him just long enough to know that he’s computed the information, then gestures toward the left door. “Your room is right this way.”

She begins to walk before him, opening a door to a very long, narrow hall, doors all the way down on either side.

“Ehm,” Louis says slowly, still a bit short of breath from all the stairs, “how come that— eh… that year thirteen has double the amount of rooms? Isn’t it the same number of—”

“Voice.” Miss Till stops in front of the seventh door to their right and shoots Louis a pointed look. “The other boys are sleeping.”

Oh. “Sorry,” Louis murmurs.

“And good question,” she half-whispers after a beat, fishing a key out of her pocket, “as a sort of last-year student privilege, all year thirteen students move up to this floor and into a single’s room. So,” she says, finally unlocking the door, “you arrive at a lucky age.”

His room is small, square and with the same green walls and dark-red carpets as the hall. There’s a bed in the corner, with a green woolen throw neatly tucked in around the edges of the mattress, and a nightstand. There’s a desk under a window and a dresser across from the bed, all in dark wood matching the panels. There’s a stack of three green sweaters on the bed, as well as plain white button-downs to wear underneath, and there’s a brief full of papers and a little pencil-case by it.

“You wear your sweater, as well as one of the shirts provided or one alike it of your own, to all classes save for gymnastics, and to meals. After dinner, you’re allowed to dress as you please, unless you’ve been given other instructions.”

Louis nods, dragging his duffel into the little room. It’s fine in here. Better than he expected. At least he won’t have to worry about sharing with a complete stranger. He’ll have privacy. That’s all he needs. 

“Is the ‘W’ for Waterbridge?” Louis asks, tracing the letter on the front of one of his given sweaters.

“Yes,” Miss Till says, “toilets and showers are at the end of the hall. Cubicles can be locked from the inside, so if you’re shy, there’s no need to worry.”

Right. Great. Brilliant. Better than he’d expected.

“So, Louis,” Miss Till says, high-pitched in a way that tells him she’s about to leave. He turns around. “School-books will be dealt to you by each individual teacher. I’ve had another last-year student assigned to meet you at the top of the stairway before breakfast tomorrow morning. He’ll show you around and answer anything you need answered. In the brief there, you’ll find a copy of the school rule-book, as well as the schedule for meal times and your classes.”

He nods.

She forces a smile. “All right, then,” she says, “I know you’ve had a long drive. I’ll let you sleep.”

“Thanks. And thanks for, eh— staying up and showing me up here.”

“No problem. Lights out soon as you’re ready for bed,” she says, and then she closes the door behind her.

Louis stands for a moment in the middle of his new bedroom. It’s neither better nor worse than back in Donny. Well, at least here he doesn’t have to make his own dinner, he supposes. That’s an upgrade.

He flicks through some of pages in the brief. Alcohol, any kind of drugs, any kind of sex, anything involving sneaking girls in anywhere, is all strictly forbidden. Hm. Louis puts down the rule-book and looks at the schedule instead. His classes start at nine. Breakfast is at eight. Lunch at twelve, then snacks at three, dinner at six. Hall-time - which he assumes means, _don’t leave the hall_ -time, at nine on weekdays, ten on weekends, lights out at eleven, always.

It’s far past eleven now. Louis changes into sweats and doesn’t bother unpacking anything. Well, he empties the big duffel until he reaches the part of it that makes him love this particular bag; the part with the secret zipper in the bottom. Under there, he’s smuggled in an entire year’s worth of weed. He rolls up, then packs everything away again and shoves the duffel under the bed for the time being. He opens his window and considers smoking out of it, but it seems too risky. This room is too small and it’ll get stuck in the carpets, the smell.

He leans over the sill and looks out. The rain hasn’t stilled, but the roof peeks out enough above him that he doesn’t get hit by a single drop. There’s a fire escape just a foot to his left.

He crawls into the window, then jumps onto the fire escape, survives - yay - and sits down and lights his spliff.

As he sits there smoking and watching the rain, sheltered by the roof, he begins to notice something. It’s too dark out to see the any parts of the garden, like the grass, if there is grass, or asphalt, if there isn’t, but he begins to see movement.

He leans in, focuses as hard he can, and the thing comes closer. Closer. And— it’s a person. It’s a person, running toward the building. He can’t really see their face, but it must be that boy from earlier, it has to be. He’s running back - but from where?

Louis watches until he disappears under him, then finishes his spliff and crawls back into his room. Not long after he’s slipped into bed, does he hear someone sneaking down the hall and then opening and closing a door just by Louis’ room.

So. The curly-haired night runner is his next-door neighbour.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing he does when his phone screams and wakes him in the morning, is panic. Where the fuck is he?

A second later, his memory falls back into place. Then he gets out of bed and looks out of his window. It’s facing the opposite way that Louis and his dad came from last night. Diagonally across from his window, very far to the right, he can see another building, a two-story one built in the same white-ish brick as the one he’s standing in. That must be the school that Miss Till referred to. Behind it, he thinks he sees some goal-posts and other outdoor facilities, which, well— great.

Aside from that and the school-building, though, there’s nothing much to see. Nothing made by man, anyway.

The boarding school’s “backyard” is a massive grass-field, stretching miles right and left, no other houses in sight. The field slants down toward a forest, maybe a mile away, and from there on he can’t see anything. There aren’t any barbwires, luckily, so Louis writes a mental note to go check out the forest sometime or another.

He finds out that what he thought was a utility closet in the corner of his room, is actually hiding a sink and mirror, and feels a bit stupid for running all the way down the hall to brush his teeth last night.

As he brings out his shaving gear and other toiletries, he begins to hear noise in the hall. Footsteps running up and down, boy voices shouting at one another, laughing, bantering. He feels a slight bit of tightness in his gut at the thought of going out there. They all sound so familiar with one another. Which they are, presumably. His dad told him he’d been the exception to the rule when he’d been taken in at age seventeen. Most of these kids have been living together since they were fourteen years old.

Oh, well. Louis’ never been the shy type. A bit of a loner at times, yes, but never shy.

He finishes up at the sink, pulls on a pair of plain black trousers, then buttons up one of his new white shirts, pulls the Waterbridge-sweater over his head and has a look at himself. He looks like a joke. But so does everyone else here, he supposes.

He waits out a group of yeller’s passing in the hall, takes in a deep breath, and then opens his door.

The group of loud boys are all tumbling down the hall, slapping each other over the back of the head’s and flicking each other’s ears and pinching each other’s bums, and then, quite ironically, yelling out _oh you loved it, you bender_ when the pinched bum-owner gets cross. They’re all wearing the same school uniforms as Louis, but they’ve accesorized with flashy trainers and heavy watches and skinny jeans. Louis doesn’t quite get what they’re peacocking for at an all-boys boarding school, but perhaps peacocking’s just as much about impressing other boys as it is the women.

Louis glances down his ugliest pair of trousers and worn-out sneaks. He won’t be impressing anyone today.

Oh, well.

He heads down the hall and stands fidgeting at the top of the staircase, waiting for his assigned tour-guide.

When the first person who notices him walks out from the hall on the right, Louis’ stomach jumps. The kid just looks him over, though, like _what the fuck is that, I haven’t seen that before_ , and then scrunches his nose and turns down the stairs, like, _but whatever, I don’t care enough to ask_.

After him, Louis calms down a bit. No one’s out to get him.

No one’s out to get him to feel particularly welcome either, as it turns out. Groups of boys keep coming through and they all notice Louis, all stop in their tracks for a millisecond, but not a single person so much as smiles at him, let alone say hello.

It’s when he looks at the time and it says five past eight that Louis realises not even the person who’s been forced to talk to him is going to. His assigned tour-guide isn’t showing up.

He heads downstairs on his own, writing a bitter mental note to rat on whoever stood him up. The halls are terribly quiet now, everyone already assembled in the dining hall. He prays that it’s not the sort of dining hall where nobody talks and everyone turns their heads the second someone walks through the door.

He walks down the wrong hall twice before finally finding his way. Soon as he comes down toward the double-doors for the dining hall, his gut untightens a bit. Roars of laughter, yelling and chatting, plates and cutlery clinking, sound through the walls and, when he walks into the dining hall, not one person bats an eye.

It’s a massive hall, with square six-seater table’s all the way down both the longer walls, one long buffet-table in the middle of the room and, at the wall across from the one Louis walked in through, doors leading out towards what looks like a kitchen when Louis catches a glimpse of someone walking through them. There are only a few people up at the buffet, and all tables are occupied, all students too absorbed in conversation or rubbing their tired morning-eyes to notice Louis.

He stands at the side of the door he just walked in through for almost an entire minute, frozen, before someone comes up to him.

“Louis,” Miss Till says, tapping his arm. A whole table of what Louis presumes are teachers and staff are staring curiously at him. “You’ve missed the morning announcements. You’ve just been introduced to the students. Where were you?”

“Ehm— I was, I went wrong, I didn’t—” Several boy-heads have turned now, looking him up and down, poking each other and whispering things. Louis swallows and looks up at Miss Till. “The person who was supposed to meet with me never showed.”

Miss Till’s eyes narrow. Then she rolls them. “I’ll take care of that, I’m very sorry, I thought I could count on the boy,” she says, and then slaps his back, “you go get yourself some breakfast, it’s not long before your classes.”

He stumbles toward the buffet, grabs a bowl and fills some oatmeal and milk in. Afterwards, he hovers around the table, pretending to be checking out the fruits, but really just scouting the room, trying to figure out which table’s the least dangerous one to impose on. People have already started getting up and leaving here and there, but not enough that Louis can sit down completely on his own anywhere - not that he really wants to do that either. Mostly, he wants to leave this bowl and just make a run back up to his room.

In the end, he zeroes in on a table in the far right corner, mostly empty. In fact, he thinks it’s fully empty until he walks a bit closer and notices a guy sitting pressed up as far out of sight as possible. He’s got blonde hair and a round ruddy face, and he’s got four plates of food on the table before him.

“S’it okay if I sit?” Louis asks him, and the boy’s head snaps up so fast Louis fears for the health of his neck.

He blinks violently, then looks down at all his plates, filled high with buttered buns and pastries and fruits. “Ehm— eh— yeah, course. Course, mate. If you want to.”

Louis nods and then wavers awkwardly, unsure of which chair to pick. In the end, he goes with the one across from the weird bloke because anything else would just be bloody ridiculous. They’re the only ones at the table and it’s not like the guy smells or anything.

“So, eh,” the blonde boy says after having spent a minute tending to his plates without actually eating anything, “you’re the new kid, aren’t ya? Louis Thompson?”

“Tomlinson.”

“Yeah, that.”

Louis nods slowly, swallowing a spoonful of oatmeal. “And you are?” he asks when the kid doesn’t speak again.

“Eh— Niall,” he says, surprised as though he isn’t used to being spoken to at all. Which, maybe he isn’t, considering he’s sitting here all on his own, “Niall Horan. Last-year student like yourself.”

“Cool,” Louis says, “is that an Irish accent or—”

“Yeah, actually. Shipped me all the way from Mullingar, my parents.”

“When?” Louis asks, because maybe he isn’t the only new kid after all. That would explain Niall’s loneliness.

“Three years ago. I’ve been here since year ten.”

Oh. Louis nods, unsure of what to say to that. This kid must be a serial killer or something. What kind of person goes to a boarding school for three years and doesn’t make a single friend? “Cool,” he says, “cool.”

They sit for a bit, just munching, eyes on their plates. Well, Niall’s eyes on one of his _many_ plates, the rest left unattended.

“So, eh— you weren’t there when they introduced you,” Niall says eventually, “what happened to you?”

Louis looks up, irritation sparking his chatty side. “Well, I was told to meet someone up at the top of the year thirteen staircase, but the bastard, whoever he was, never bothered to show. Stood there like a fuckin’ idiot until everyone else had gone down here, didn’t I? Still don’t know who the hell he was.”

“Oh,” Niall says, and then drops his gaze.

“What?”

“Nothing, I just—”

“What? Spit it out, I’ve got twenty minutes till I’ve gotta be in class and I need a shower first cause I fuckin’ stink.”

Niall laughs a bit at Louis bluntness and Louis laughs too, relieved that showing a bit of his true colours hasn’t scared the kid off, and then Niall says; “I think it was Harry Styles. The guy that stood you up. I overheard Miss Till assigning him the other day.”

“Who’s Harry Styles?” Louis asks and, when Niall laughs at that like it’s ridiculous; “why is that so funny?”

“I don’t know, it’s just—” Niall shrugs a shoulder, “don’t think I’ve heard someone ask that question since year ten or something. Everyone knows who Harry Styles is. Even the new year ten’s, I’m sure.”

“Well, I don’t know who the fuck Harry Styles is,” Louis says dryly, already sort of hating the bloke, “but he sounds like a stuck up prick.”

“I don’t know, he’s all right when he wants to be. Well, not to me, but I’m the school faggot so I can’t really blame him.”

Louis coughs up a bit of oatmeal. He grossly swallows it back down. “Beg your pardon?”

“He’s all right when he wants to be,” Niall repeats, smiling.

“No, not that part, the part before, about you being the school—”

Niall’s gaze glides up over Louis’ head. “He’s just walked in, actually. Harry Styles. Looks a bloody nightmare. Think he’s been ill since term started. Not that I’d know, he wouldn’t speak to me, but—”

The odd Irishman keeps talking, but Louis tunes him out and turns toward the doors to see this Harry Styles.

It’s the curly-haired night runner.

Although he looks more like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame in the light of day. His sweater is crinkled and he hasn’t got any buttondown on underneath and he’s wearing the same joggers and shoes he had on last night, mud and grass clinging to the trainers. His greasy hair hangs down over his eyes, which doesn’t help the fact that he looks as though he’s struggling to keep them just the tiniest bit open.

Behind him, Miss Till walks in. She takes him by the arm, says something with a sharp look in her eyes, and then she walks back to her own table and lets him slump along. He heads straight for the pots of tea and coffee, pours two cups of black coffee for himself and poisons them with six tall teaspoons of sugar each. Then he takes three banana’s and an orange and heads toward Louis and Niall.

Fuck. He’s coming to apologise for not showing. He’s coming to talk to Louis. Louis pushes his shoulders back, preparing to give him a bit of an earful, just to establish dominance, just to let everyone within earshot know that he won’t be someone to refer to as “the school faggot” or anything of the sort.

But, Harry Styles doesn’t come to his table. He doesn’t even lift his head high enough to see Louis. He stops two tables over from Louis’, and sits down with the group of loud boys Louis saw walk down the hall earlier. They all shout in greeting, happy to see him, but quickly calm down when they realise he isn’t in a mood to be spoken to at all. Louis watches him gulp down both steaming hot coffee-cups in two slurps and then bury into his arms and fall asleep on the table.

“What the fuck is wrong with him?” Louis asks, turning back to Niall.

“I don’t know, but I get the slight feeling that he may not be sleeping very well.”

Louis makes eyes at him. “Ya  _think_?”

“He’s been getting worse and worse every day,” Niall says, after laughing a bit too generously at Louis’ sarcasm - not that Louis minded, nothing to boost his ego like an easy crowd, “fell asleep in the middle of class the other day, knocked his head into the table so everyone turned around and he woke himself and screamed, it was fuckin’ hilarious. I ended up laughing my bleedin’ arse off and he nearly punched me for it, but I couldn’t help it.”

“Right,” Louis says, struggling to follow Niall’s blabbering. For a supposed school faggot and outcast, he’s awfully talkative. “Well, I think I might know why he’s tired.”

“Why?”

“Well, I saw him going for a run in the middle of the night when I arrived. If he’s doing that every night, he’s probably losing a few hours of sleep.”

“Ah,” Niall says, biting his lip, “that’s odd.”

“Yep. Maybe he’s got an eating disorder or something, trying to burn off extra calories and that.”

Niall laughs, then slaps the table and gets up. “So,” he says, “are you gonna help me smuggle this out of here?”

“What do you mean?”

Niall doesn’t answer him, but instead pulls a crumbled-up plastic bag out of his pocket and begins to stuff it with the food off his plates. When it’s filled, he pulls another from his other pocket and fills that as well. There’s a banana left that Louis quickly snatches, just to feel like he’s helping out. Niall’s the only student who’s spoken to him so far; he’d better make a good impression.

“Why are we smuggling food?” he asks when they’re heading up the stairs, holding one of Niall’s bags each.

“I like food,” Niall says.

“All right, then,” Louis replies, afraid to offend.

It turns out Niall’s in the same hall as Louis, first door on the right. His room looks exactly like Louis’, except his desk is covered in a mountain of schoolbooks and papers, his dresser’s got a guitar lying on top of it and his nightstand’s got an open box of Kleenex and a half-empty bottle of hand lotion standing on it.

“Get dry hands and sniffles a lot?” Louis asks with a grin as they drop the food-bags on Niall’s bed.

“No, I just wank all the fuckin’ time,” Niall replies.

“Oh. Okay.”

He stands for a moment longer, until he realises Niall is wavering in the middle of the room, silent, too polite to verbally ask him to leave.

“Well,” Louis says, clapping his hands together and turning around, “I better go hop in that shower.”

“Have fun.”

“Eh, thanks,” school-faggot, “I’ll see you around.”  

Louis heads out then, and Niall hauls the door in and locks it the second he’s passed the threshold. Odd bloke. But nice, though. Easy crowd, easy-going, easy enough to make friends with. Louis writes a mental note to go and force friendship upon the Irish lad if he gets bored later on.

He heads back to his room, grabs a towel and lays his clothes out, then hurries down the hall and into the bathrooms. There are several blokes walking about, doing their business, more or less dressed, more or less awake. Louis walks past unnoticed and has his shower behind a locked door.

When he comes out again, though, there’s only one person standing in the bathrooms. The curly-haired night runner.

Well, he isn’t so curly-haired right now, as he’s just jumped out of the shower too, coming out of the cubicle across from Louis’. His arms are covered in goosebumps and his nipples are hard, his lips purplish, like he’s been showering at freezing temperature. He’s shaking, too, but at least he looks a bit more alive than he did down in the dining hall.

When he notices Louis, he fastens the towel round his waist, and says, in the deepest rasp of a voice Louis’ ever heard come out of a seventeen year old boy; “new kid, in’you?”

“Yeah,” Louis says, pushing his shoulders back, puffing up his chest. Harry Styles is a bit too tall for his liking. “The kid who was supposed to have met me at the top of the stairs this morning, in’you?”

Harry Styles blinks at him, terribly slow. “Yeah,” he says, “I slept in.”

And then, before Louis has a chance to pry an apology or at least just the recognition that he did something wrong, out of him, Harry Styles turns around and leaves.

Yep. A stuck up prick.

 

*

 

Louis doesn’t make any friends in his classes, hopefully for lack of trying, probably for lack of likability. Anyway, he doesn’t make any friends, he _hopes_ , because he doesn’t have a fucking second to focus on talking to anyone. He’s arrived a week late into term and he’s struggling to keep up already. After every class, he pulls the teacher aside and half-forces them into an interrogation on last weeks teaching’s. Resulting in him missing any chance he had to chat to anyone in the hallways.

When he’s finally finished his last class of the day, math of all things, he’s too tired to even make it down for afternoon snacks. He goes straight up to his room, face-plants his bed and falls right asleep.

He wakes when someone’s walked directly into his room without knocking and started violently poking him between the shoulderblades.

“You didn’t show up for dinner so I was told to go and get you,” Niall says, smile so oblivious and non-threatening that Louis doesn’t have it in him to be you-woke-me-from-a-great-dream-you-soulless-bastard-angry at him, “Miss Till saw us sit together at breakfast so now she thinks we’re friends.”

“Oh.” Louis smooths out the crinkles in his sweater and follows Niall down the quiet hall. “Aren’t we friends?” he asks after his head’s woken properly up and he actually processes Niall’s words.

Niall barks a laugh. “I don’t have any friends. I’m the school faggot.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Louis mutters, “but so long as you don’t try anything, I won’t hate you for it. Besides, are you even really bent or is it just something they think?”

Niall shrugs a shoulder. “It doesn’t matter if I am or not. It just matters that they think I am,” he says, “but if you’ll help me smuggle more food out tonight, we can be friends.”

“Deal.”

Niall and Louis sit together with a mute year eleven-kid for dinner. The food is all right and Niall talks so much shit that Louis ends up having a pretty good time, but he still can’t stop looking over at the loud boy-table. The loud boys have dragged about four chairs too many to their table and they’re all scream-laughing and shouting, making sure not a soul misses how big and bad they all are, how much they love the sounds of their own voices.

All of them except for Harry Styles.

When he’s up getting food, he drops a glass and then a fork, twice, and he scoops a mountain of peas onto his plate only to have them all roll off while he loses focus trying to poor himself some milk. When he’s down at the table, he’s not even touching his food. He’s either staring deadly into thin air or he’s lying like he did at breakfast, face in his arms. The lads around him poke a bit of fun, but seem to have a weird sort of respect for him that doesn’t apply to anybody else, seem to leave him be soon as he gives them the slightest look.

He’s not even _that_ buff. Louis doesn’t get it.

“I think he does have an eating disorder,” Louis says, cutting Niall off in the middle of a sentence. He doesn’t seem to mind. A lot of the time he talks just to talk, Louis thinks. “Harry Styles. He runs about all night, he never eats at mealtimes. He’s starving himself, I called it.”

Niall glances over at the loud boy-table and then back at Louis, skeptical. “Doubt it,” he says, “he’s too buff to be starving.”

“He’s not _that_ buff,” Louis mutters, and Niall’s eyes glide up and down him like _look who’s talking_ , and Louis flexes his biceps and changes the topic.

 

*

 

Niall and Louis hang out in Niall’s room for a while after they’ve brought up more smuggled food. Niall turns out to be hiding a weed-stash that would make Louis’ look like a tiny plant beside a forest in comparison. There’s a fire escape close to Niall’s window, too, and they smoke out there while watching a flock of the year ten’s fuck around with a remote-controlled airplane down in the garden area.

“I get why you steal so much food now,” Louis says to Niall, “you smoke up every night?”

Niall looks over at him and then laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “get the crazy munchies.”

“How are you not fat?”

“Lucky metabolism.”

“Bastard,” Louis mutters, slapping at his little belly. It’s not too bad, but he was planning on starting with the sit-ups again at some point. Then again, going to an all-boys boarding school doesn’t exactly motivate the part of him that yearns to look desirable. “Any hot female teachers at this school at all?”

“Depends what you define as hot,” Niall says.

“Right, so they’re all mingers, then.”

“Depends what you define as mingers,” Niall grins. He shrugs a shoulder. “Miss Till has her days.”

“Miss Till is, like, fifty.”

“Fifty year old women are hot sometimes.”

“Yeah, to fifty year old men, not to us,” Louis says, “isn’t there, like, a cute art teacher or a swimming instructor or summat?”

“The swimming instructor’s actually quite all right. Think she’s only thirty or something.”

“Well, Niall,” Louis says, getting up and slapping his shoulder, “you’ve just helped me decide which extra-curricular sport to sign up for. Thanks for the spliff, I’m going to bed.”

“G’night, mate.”

Louis can still hear him cackling from the fire escape when he reaches the door. He shakes his head at that crazy, weed-smoking idiot, smiling to himself as he heads down the hall.

His smile fades when he sees Harry Styles coming out of the bathroom. From the looks of his lips and nipples, he’s had himself another one of those icy showers, and he drops his keys twice trying to unlock his bedroom door.

Which results in Louis standing arm-to-arm with him as they both fiddle with their locks.

Harry groans loudly when he drops his keys a third time. Louis glances over at him. His hands are shaking so badly Louis can’t help but feel bad for him, stuck up prick or not. He bends down to get his keys off the floor for him, but just as he does, Harry bends too, and their foreheads knock together.

“Argh, what the fuck?!” Harry groans, shoving out at Louis before he sees what hit him. Which is semi-forgivable, but then he straightens up - well, for Hunchback of Notre-Dame-standards - and blinks his droopy eyes open and shoves Louis again. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Louis regains his balance, having stumbled backwards a few steps from the hard shove. Maybe Harry is a _little_ bit buff. “Jesus, calm down,” he exclaims, “ever heard of a fuckin’ accident, mate, I was trying to do you a favour?”

“What, by headbutting me?”

“No, by picking your bloody keys up, jitter-hands.”

“How the fuck do you help someone pick their bloody keys up by headbutting them?” Harry shouts, and his eyes are half-closed, his keys still on the floor, hands still shaking so badly Louis can’t keep his eyes off of them.

“Jesus, mate, just let me pick the bloody keys up,” Louis sighs, bending down again.

Just as he touches his fingertips to the keys, he receives a hard shove to his head. He loses balance completely this time, falling onto his bum on the hallway floor.

“Don’t patronize me, I can help myself,” Harry hisses, violently scraping the keys off the floor and somehow magically managing to jam them properly into this lock. “Mind your own goddamned business,” he says, and slams his bedroom door behind him.

Louis’ hands are shaking too, once he manages to get up, but not from sleep-deprivation or starving himself.

From fucking _hating_ this stuck-up prick.


	3. Chapter 3

He considers telling Miss Till about Harry Styles’ unacceptable behavior, and maybe also the fact that he looks as though he’s recently gone cold turkey on a serious drug addiction, and the fact that someone continues to be running across the lawn after light’s out every single night and Louis is ninety-nine point nine percent certain it’s Harry Styles, too. He considers it, but then thinks better of it; it’s never a good idea to risk making yourself out as a snitch when you’re the new kid at school. Instead, he keeps his mouth shut and goes and signs up for swimming as his extra-curricular sport. Niall, who prefers getting his workouts in at the gym so as not to get “accidentally” drowned by one of his bullies, school-faggot and all, told him that the swim instructor was quite all right looking and, about that, he was right.

Which would explain why Harry Fucking Styles has signed up too.

Louis and a flock of year twelve and thirteen’s are all standing in their school-provided Speedo’s at the side of the school’s indoor pool, having their names called, but, of course, when Miss Flack calls Harry’s name, there’s no response.

“Harry Styles?” she says again, looking round the group. “Anyone know if he’s running late?”

“I saw him in the changing rooms,” one of the lads who came running in last minute says, “he’d just gone to the loo when I walked out.”

“All right, well… all right, you all go ahead and jump in the pool, then.”

They crawl into the lukewarm pool one by one, treading water and watching Miss Flack write instructions up on the board. She’s wearing knee-length red swim trunks, a navy-blue bathing suit underneath and she has her brown hair up in a bun. Louis wonders if she’s going to take off the trunks and come in the water with them at some point, but, as he does, he forgets to tread water and his head dips under the surface. When he comes back up for air, the other’s have been instructed to swim down toward the shallow end of the pool.

“Mr. Tomlinson,” she says, frowning down at him, “what are you doing, get a move on.”

“Yeah, I— yeah, sorry,” he says, and begins to doggy paddle his way after the others, only then remembering that he can’t actually swim. No one ever taught him to.

He begins to drown again.

“Mr. Tomlinson!” Miss Flack is shouting when he comes up again. She’s crouched at the side of the pool, hands on her knees, staring at him. “You do know this isn’t a beginner’s class?”

“Yeah, I’m not a— I—” he pants, and does a jumpy move to get to the edge before he falls underwater again. “I’m not a beginner,” he says, clutching the edge.

Miss Flack doesn’t look convinced. She opens her mouth to argue him on it, but then she sees something across the pool that makes her forget about him.

Louis turns around too, elbows over the edge, and watches Harry Styles come out of the boy’s changing rooms. He’s in the same black Speedo’s as everyone else, but apart from that he looks nothing like the rest of them. He’s hunched over completely, his face nearly see-through, dried-out, under-eyes so dark and baggy _they_ might very well be what’s weighing his head down, and he’s forgotten both to wetten his hair so as to look like he washed it before coming in here _and_ to bring his goggles. He looks horrendous without clothes on, emaciated yet flabby around the middle due to his crappy posture, skin so white it hurts to look at him.

“Mr. Styles!” Miss Flack yells, so loudly Louis jumps at it because she’s sitting right behind his head, and he loses his grip on the pool-edge and falls underwater again.

When he comes up gasping for air for the third embarrassing time in less than five minutes, Harry Styles has made his way to the shallow end of the pool and the rest of the boys. Miss Flack is there too, giving him an earful for being late and forgetting his goggles and looking shit, and he’s just nodding, looking at her like he doesn’t actually see her, and then slumping down to sit. He slowly melts into the water, like a blob of vanilla pudding slapped against the edge of the pool.

Then Miss Flack turns to Louis and shouts; “Mr. Tomlinson, if you don’t get off your arse and come down here in the next three seconds, you’re off the team!”

He nearly drowns himself four times, but makes it down there.

They start off with eight lanes of crawl to warm up. Louis attempts, he really does, but halfway down the first lane, the guy behind him swims straight up into his balls and Louis yells and turns around to drown him, but then drops underwater while trying and drowns himself instead.

Miss Flack kicks him off the team after that.

He’s handed over his goggles and is doing the walk of shame around the pool toward the changing rooms when he hears another round of shouting and splashing and turns to see Miss Flack jumping into the water, swim trunks and all.

She grabs a big white whale of a body from behind, arm hooked across his chest and then does crawl-takes on her back, hauling him to the edge. Two of the other boys help shove the boy’s bum upward while she pulls him out of the pool and then she throws him onto his back and slaps him in the face, twice, before he opens his eyes.

He rolls over, coughing and spluttering.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Miss Flack hisses while slapping his back to help him cough up any water he swallowed, “what happened?”

“Nothing, I just— lost focus, fell underwater,” Harry Styles begins to rasp out between coughs, “I don’t know, I—”

“He fell asleep while swimming,” one of the year twelve-lads says, and everyone turns to give him dagger-eyes and he lifts his hands in defense and says; “sorry, but that’s just what it looked like.”

Miss Flack pulls Harry up to sit and asks him a couple times if he’s going to be all right. Then she sends him Louis’ way. Louis quickly turns, rushing to the changing rooms.

He’s just stepped under one of the shower’s when Harry walks in. Louis pretends not to notice him, turning into the wall and closing his eyes under the cold-ish rays.

“Hey,” Harry rasps at him, and Louis mutters it back without turning. He can hear Harry flick on the shower just beside himself, and feel the ice-cold temperature he likes to keep his water at spray up his side as Harry jumps around under it. “New kid. New kid. New ki—”

“Yes?” Louis hisses, just as his own water cuts off.

“You want soap?” Harry asks, because he’s standing by the soap-dispenser and Louis isn’t.

Louis looks at him skeptically, unsure if he’s up to something, but his eyes are so close to drooping closed that Louis doubts he has the capacity to think out evil pranks right now. “Yeah, thanks,” he mutters, and Harry pumps out a gunk for him and smears it into his hand.

Louis turns away from him as he soaps himself up, but Harry doesn’t leave it at that. “Why would you sign up if you can’t swim?” he asks.

“I _can_ swim,” Louis says, “she just didn’t give me a chance.”

“But, like,” Harry drawls, and then doesn’t say anything for a full thirty seconds, “but, uhm, why would you splash around and try and drown yourself like that, then?” he asks, when he’s finally regained consciousness.

Louis turns his shower back on and closes his eyes as the soap washes down his body. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“Wha’?”

Louis’ water cuts off and he steps out of the shower, glancing back at Harry, who’s still fighting to keep his eyes open. “I said, I could ask you the same thing.”

“Wha’?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Louis turns and yanks his towel off the hanger, then turns again as he starts to dry himself, “I said, I could ask you the same thing. Why’d you sign up for swimming only to try and drown yourself like that?”

Harry looks Louis up and down, except he only looks him down and then his eyes never open again. His head nods forward a few times before it drops down between his shoulders completely and his legs start to give out.

“ _Shit_!” Louis leaps forward, stepping right under the icy rays and grabbing the boy under the arms. “Fuckin’ hell, wake up, I can’t support your fat weight, mate, you—”  he slaps Harry in the face and Harry blinks violently before his eyes blow wide.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he exclaims, voice still too broken to be yelling, but brows just as angry and furrowed as they were when he shoved Louis onto his arse the other day. “Get the fuck off of me, you fucking bender.”

Louis stumbles backwards, incredulous. “You were falling a fucking sleep, you were about to crack your skull open on the tile, you ungrateful fuckin’—” he shakes his head and throws a hand out dismissively, “never mind, I’ll leave you here to nod off and die, it’s not my problem.”

He marches into the lockerroom, dries his himself agressively enough that his skin starts to burn, then rips his locker open and digs out his pants.

“Calm down, Mary,” Harry drawls, padding in after him, “s’not my fault I don’t like dick.”

Louis doesn’t answer him, just yanks his pants up and finds his shirt.

“And, you know, just for another time,” Harry goes on from where he’s pulling his clothes on at the bench behind Louis, “good idea to ask before you jump naked into the, uhm… the shower, with another, ehm… another bloke.”

Louis still doesn’t answer him, just leaves him and his foggy frog-head be and buttons up his shirt, tugs up his trousers and pulls his sweater over his head. He shoves his swim gear back into the plastic bag he came with and passes Harry Styles on the bench without so much as a nod in his direction.

 

*

 

He’s in his room about ten minutes later, half trying to figure out why the hell it seems like every single pornsite’s been blocked by the school’s internet provider and how to get around that issue, and half trying to pull himself together to go down and pick up some afternoon-snacks, when he hears noise right outside. Or, more specifically, when he hears someone slamming down the door next to his own, groaning and cursing at it.

“What the bloody hell is going on out here?” he hisses, ripping his door open.

It’s Harry Styles. Of course it is.

He’s standing in front of his own door, swim bag by his feet and hair still damp, hand shaking around the handle of his door. He yanks at it weakly a few more times, then drops his forehead to the door with a long sigh and lets his eyes flutter closed.

“I don’t know where my keys are,” he slurs out, “I thought I had them, but… I thought I did, but now I… now I…”

And then his hand slips off the handle, and his forehead starts to slide downwards.

“Fuck, not again,” Louis groans, but Harry starts to stumble blindly, legs wobbling, and Louis can’t stop himself from charging forward, grabbing him around the waist to hold him up. “What’s going on?” he breathes out, trying to steady Harry against the wall, but he’s too tall, he keeps drooping forward, making Louis lose balance, “mate, what the fuck is going on, are you ill, do I need to— come on, let me take you to the nurse, you’re obviously—”

“No, no, no, I just, no,” Harry grumbles, chin rested over Louis’ shoulder, “I just don’t want… I just want to sleep, I don’t want… I can’t in my room, it’s…”

“Yeah, your keys are gone, I get it, but… oh _god_ , you’re a big boy,” Louis groans, “jesus, I—” there’s no one in the hall to help, all either in the gym for their obligatory sessions or at their extra-curricular sports. “Okay, come on,” he sighs, and ends up shoving Harry backwards into his own room. He manages to keep him on his feet until he can drop him backwards onto the bed.

He clutches his own hips, catching his breath, and studies the long boy lying stretched out on his bed, greasy dark hair falling over his eyes.

“Jesus, why don’t you sleep at night,” he mutters, not really expecting a response.

He turns to go and get Harry’s sports bag from the hall, but soon as he takes one step over the threshold, Harry whines out, “where are you going?”

Louis doesn’t answer him, just gets the bag first and comes back in, closing the door behind himself.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asks.

Harry’s eyes keep closing and opening again, closing and opening, his head swaying in all different directions. “Please,” he gets out, “can you, uhm… please.”

“What?”

“Are you gonna go?” he asks, completely delirious.

Louis crosses his arms over his chest. “What do you mean, am I gonna go? I was planning on getting a staff-member to come and see what the hell is going on with you, yeah, but—”

“Please don’t,” Harry murmurs, slapping the bed, “can you please just… please, I promise I’ll be better, but… please just stay in here. Just stay in here while I sleep. Please. Please.”

“Listen, mate, I’m not trying to get in the way of your sleep, but I think you need to talk to a—”

Harry opens his eyes widely and looks straight at him. “Please,” he exclaims, “please, can you just… sit in… in here and,” he falls back down again, smacking his lips and patting the bed, “please, can you, please, please…” his voice goes so whiny Louis fears he’s actually going to start crying like a baby, and if there’s one thing Louis doesn’t know how to deal with it’s big boys crying like babies in front of him.

“Okay,” he exclaims exasperatedly, and turns to lock his door because this could look wrong to anyone walking in, “okay, then. You absolute _freak_.”

Louis wavers for a bit, then sits down on the rug by the bed, resting back against the side of it as he finds his headphones and a movie on his laptop. Before he’s plugged the headphones in, though, he feels a hand slap the top of his head. Or rather, pat it, sort of like a dog.

“Thank you,” Harry murmurs between long snoring breaths, “thank you, stay in here, thank you…”

“That’s, eh— that’s all right, mate. You just… you have a kip and I’ll be, eh— I’ll be sitting right here.”  

“Mhm,” Harry murmurs, patting Louis’ head once more before turning over, “sleep well, Harry...”

Louis glances back at him, frowning, but it’s no use because Harry’s too far gone. “Yeah, sleep well,” he mutters, “Harry.”

Harry smiles into his pillow, and then murmurs his last words before dozing off completely; “I love you, mummy.”

Louis’ headphones drop out of his hands. What. The. Actual. Fuck.


	4. Chapter 4

Harry Styles sleeps restlessly, tosses and turns and even kicks Louis in the back of the head a couple of times. Several times, Louis takes out an earbud and hears him murmuring things like _mummm_ and  _yes mummy_ and _missed you, mummy_. Needless to say, Louis tries to keep both earbuds in at all times. When his second movie ends, though, and it’s about dinner-time and Harry Styles still lies face-down on his bed, cradling his pillow and snoring around his own thumb, Louis takes his earbuds out, swings them like a lasso and whips him up the side of the face.

His hand flies up to clutch hischeek with a hiss, brows snapping together. He mutters something nonsensical, then turns over, revealing a pear-shaped drool-mark on Louis’ pillowcase under where his mouth had been.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Louis stares at the back of Harry Styles’ curly head for a while, then stomps his bare feet, useless against the carpeted floor, then yells, “wake up!”

“Hmmph.”

“Wake the fuck up!”

Harry’s mouth opens, but not to respond, only to fold around the corner of Louis’ pillow, soaking that in his vomitous mouth-water too. Louis takes a deep breath in, then swings his lasso again, swatting Harry sharply across the cheek. This time he whines loudly, clutching his face, then coughs a couple times, scrunches his nose and opens his eyes.

“Oh, great.” Louis rolls his earphones up calmly. “You woke up. Just in time for dinner.”

Harry rubs at his cheek, rolling over. His eyes catch on the earphones. “Did you just smack me with those?”

“No.”

“Yes you did.”

“Can’t help you here, mate, sorry. Wasn’t me.”

Louis turns, fully expecting Harry to call him out on his bullshit, or at least just kick out at the backs of his knees to make him budge over and crumble in on the carpet, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, as Louis draws off his sweatshirt to spray himself under the pits with one of the one-hundred deodorants he brought here, Harry sits up and tells him; “thanks for this. Feel better than I have in weeks right now.”

“Oh.” Louis glances over his shoulder. Harry’s sitting up now, long legs over the edge of the bed, eyes darting from Louis and over to the nightstand when Louis looks back at him. “No problem, I suppose.” Louis turns back around, scouting his carpet for a half-clean button-down, “although you do have a bit of explaining to do.”

“Why’ve you got five different deodorants?”

Pulling the sleeve of a button-down, which he just sprayed wet under the pits with Calvin Klein’s Eternity to cover the slight smell of stale four-day-old sweat, up one arm, Louis turns back around. Harry’s picked one of his deodorants off the nightstand, the gold one, and is now holding it in his big hand like one might hold their own dick when they were tugging themselves off.

“Quit touching my stuff.”

“I like this one,” Harry sprays a bit out in the air in front of himself, then sticks his face forward, sniffing it in like a homosexual French perfume-salesman,  “Paco Rabanne.”

“Wha’?” Reaching up to the dip between his collarbones, Louis realises he’s buttoned his entire shirt crookedly. He stifles the slight urge to rip the whole thing to shreds, Hulk-style, instead slowly breathing out through his nostrils and starting over. “Paco Ra-what?”

“You don’t even look at the names of the deodorants you buy?” Harry’s brows furrow, but he doesn’t spare Louis a look, just goes for the next bottle, spraying that directly into the Paco Ra-what fog he just created, then sniffing that too. “But you’ve got so many, it’s like you collect them. Oh, I don’t like this one. Had this one once. Mum said I smelled like one of her pervy exes that used to wear, like, a fanny-pack.”

“Ew.”

“Unironically.”

“ _Ew_.”

“Yeah.” He picks a third one up and goes through the motions once more. “Why’ve you got so many, though?”

Louis, who’d been putting off answering the question, hoping it’d get left and forgotten, sighs. He turns to find his sweater, mostly just to avoid looking Harry in the eye - although that shouldn’t be that much of an issue, seeing as Harry’s face is now entrapped by a large, blurry cloud of cheap spray-deodorant.

“Just do,” Louis mutters, “easy access. Like to smell nice.”

“Hm. Seems weird.”

“Well. Suppose I am a bit.”

“What?”

“Weird.”

Harry looks up at him, brows a bit arched.

Had Louis been an honest person, he’d have just answered the question. Well, he doesn’t consider himself directly _dishonest_ either, it’s not as though he _enjoys_ telling untruths, and he’d never lie about the big things. The small things, he doesn’t much like lying about either, if he can get out of it, but the thing about the small things is that, if talked about honestly, they might lead to talking about the bigger things, too. And since he’d never lie about the big things, but also doesn’t have the slightest desire what so ever to be talking about the big things honestly, it’s often easiest just to lie about the small things before anything comes to that. It tends to work out best. Easiest.

“Okay.” Harry’s head drops again and so does Louis’ shoulders. “Okay, then, new kid.”

It’s not that there’s a big horrible backstory to the collection of cheap deodorants Louis’ got standing on his nightstand. It’s just that if he talked about the fact that every single one of those bottles are Christmas presents, birthday presents, ‘sorry I went away for months on end’-presents and ‘sorry I will again soon and soon after that and soon after that’-presents, he might also have to talk about the fact that his dad buys every single one of his presents ever, important or lesser so, at the airport. That his dad not only doesn’t know him well enough to know what else to buy him but a random bottle of pit-freshener, but also has absolutely no time, nor desire to attempt to change that fact.

He might have to talk about the fact that, despite knowing all of that, he still keeps every single one of those bottles out on display, in lieu of the family photo’s they never found the time to take. 

“Christ, it smells like a whore’s handbag in here.” Louis shoves the windows open. “Just, bit of life advice for you mate; try not to spray five different deodorants out in someone’s tiny bedroom without asking first.”

“Gee, thanks,” Harry Styles mutters.

Louis leans back against the window-sill, looking him over. “We’ve got dinner in a minute. Better go and find one of your sweaters if you don’t want an earful off Miss Till.”

“Hm?” Harry glances down at the white shirt he’s got on, buttons popped open down to his sternum. It’s identical to the one Louis’ got on underneath his sweater, save for the tiny little emblem of a polo-player on horse, of course. “Oh. No, I’ve got it in there.”

He nods toward the sportsbag that Louis kicked into the corner by the door and left there.

“Right.” Louis taps his fingers at the cool underside of his window-sill. “All right, well—”

“You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”

Harry’s eyes are wide, bottom lip caught behind his teeth.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t know what _to_ tell,” Louis says, studying the other boy. He’s still got heavy bags under his eyes, but they’re puffier now, slightly less dark than they were before. His hands aren’t shaking anymore. “Why ‘aven’t you been sleeping?”

“I _have_ been—”

“Right, well, if you’re just going to lie then I’ll have no problem going straight down and telling Miss Till that you just—”

“No, fuck off,” Harry hisses, and Louis’ mouth snaps shut, “fuck off, I— okay, I,” he drags a hand through his hair, easily smoothing back from his pale face with how greasy it is, “okay, all right, I— I don’t know. I just can’t. I just haven’t been— I just can’t sleep in my own room.”

“Why?”

“I just can’t. I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”    

“You just don’t like it?” Louis gives him a sceptic look, but his gaze is pinned to his hands now, which he’s taken to wringing around in his lap, so it’s no use. “That makes zero sense. And besides, I know you run around outside every night. I see you from up here, it’s not that hard once you know what to look for.”

Finally, Harry looks up. His brows a drawn together, a deep furrow between them. “Not _every_ night,” he says, “I’ve done it, like, a couple times.”

Louis snorts. “Every _single_ night, mate.”

“’ve you been stalking me or something, you bent fuck?”

“Bloody hell, you’re really touchy about this, aren’t you?” Louis laughs. “Christ. Why get so defensive, what’ve you got to hide? Where do you go at night? Meeting a secret forest-lover out there or summat?”

“I don’t get—” Harry’s mouth is round, his brows deeply furrowed. He shakes his head. “I don’t get you, I’ve told you I only go night-running once in a while, I don’t—” he shakes his head again, slapping his thighs. “Right, fuck this. Fuck this, I don’t have the patience.”

He gets up, pushing his shoulders back, and suddenly he’s quite a bit taller than Louis remembered him.

“Listen, I’ve tried being nice, but you’re being a pain in the fuckin’ arse so, like— listen. If you so much as hint at me coming in here, at any of this happening or at me running out at night, I will,” he steps closer, Louis backing up against the window-sill, “have to remind you that I am not above spreading lies about you.”

He steps in closer, the stench of five different deodorants and the chlorine he never bothered to wash from his hair engulfing Louis.

“And I’m not above making sure no one here ever, _ever_ fucking talks to you again, not even your little Irish friend.”

He reaches over and rests a hand on the window-sill just by Louis’ and, in that moment, Louis becomes terribly aware that Harry Styles is, in fact, quite buff.

“And, uhm, also,” he says, low and soft as though he hasn’t got Louis pressed hard up against an open window, “I am not at _all_ above violence.” He looks up, eyes dark, “and neither are any of my mates. And I’ve got a hell of a lot more of them here than you do. I own this fucking school.”

He doesn’t blink for several seconds, just holds Louis’ gaze, stares at him until Louis gives in and absolutely _has_ to let go of the breath he’d been holding. It falls from his nostrils, shaky, and Harry drops his gaze, pleased.

He taps his fingers on the sill a few times. “So, you won’t tell anyone, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Louis breathes, knuckles white, trembling, where his hands clutch the edge of the sill, “yeah.”

Harry nods, smiling a little. “Yeah.”

Then he turns around and saunters off.

Louis stays presses back against the window, cold air from outside hitting him in hard strokes, going straight down the back of his shirt, raising the few hairs left on him that don’t already stand up stiffly. He watches Harry Styles crouch down before his bag, rummage around and then go, “oh, yay! Nice, I found my key”, then grab the bag, haul himself up and leave the room without so much as a goodbye.

It isn’t until he’s heard the door to Harry’s own room open and close again, that Louis falls back onto flat feet and loosens his death-grip on the window-sill. Then he knocks every single stupid deodorant off of his nightstand and rips the sheets off his bed in a fury.

 

*

 

He switches to working out in the school gym as his extracurricular activity.

“Almost there,” Niall mutters as Louis waits by his door, watching him attempt to pull a pair of bright green tights up over his thighs. So far as Louis’ understood it, the school gym is open for free use between twelve and half past eight pm all days, but on Thursdays, like today, which is extracurricular activity-day for all year thirteens, there’s a designated time they’ve got to be clocking in down there.

Which is five minutes ago.

“Hurry up already.”

“Just a sec, aaaalmost there.”

Niall throws himself back on his bed, grunting and red-faced as he fights to pull the stupid tights on. Niall isn’t particularly big and burly, nor round and jiggly, so there’s only one possible explanation as to why pulling the bloody tights on makes him sound and look as though he’s trying to shit out a bowel movement the size of Britain; “your tights are too fucking small, mate.”

“No no, I always wear ‘em.”

“I’ve never seen you wear them.”

Niall huffs out a sharp breath, lifting his hips off the mattress. “I mean to—” he grunts breathlessly, “to the gym, I always wear ‘em.”

“All right, well, just because you always do something doesn’t necessarily make it right.”

“Who are you to judge?”

“Just saying, you’re not exactly helping the whole ‘school faggot’ thing wearing those.”

“They’re, _ungh_ , they’re fucking _fine_ , just—”  

Louis scratches at the hem of his own loose-flailing, knee-length shorts. “Just trying to help you, that’s all. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life and one thing only, it’s that if trying to put your trousers on makes you look like you’re in the midst of childbirth, those trousers may be slightly too small.”

“Nope!” Niall jumps off the bed, tights so tight around his stomach it’s making him look like one of those fat women in make-over programs who get pressed inside any random brightly coloured sack and then squeezed to death over the middle with a stomach-belt so as to accentuate their ‘natural hourglass-shape’. “Just fine,” he croaks.

They head downstairs wordlessly.

Waterbridge’s gym is a large square room, walls the same pine green colour as the rest of the building, floor charcoal-grey and rubbery. Simple black speakers stream a low, indistinguishable pop-tune from the corners of the ceiling. Along the left wall stand a row of treadmills and ellipticals, along the right a string of different torture-instruments, more commonly known as “weight-machines”. The wall across from the door lines up a selection of various free weights and supplies for erotic asphyxiation - or perhaps just jump ropes and resistance bands.

In the middle of the room hangs a large leather punching bag. Beside it, punching from under red boxing gloves, stands Harry Styles. Because of course he does. He’s in short red shorts, a sweat-soaked white t-shirt and has pulled the fronts of his hair into the tiniest little man-bun, tons of little curls still springing out around his face, clinging to the edges of it. His skin is dripping wet, blotchy red from his chest to his temples, his mouth slack, wet, colouredlike the inside of a perfectly ripe cherry.

He looks like shit.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Louis mutters to Niall, who’s signing them in with the green-haired teacher who’s name is either miss Glass or miss Grass. Could be either or, but Louis’ inclined to believe it’s the latter for hair-related reasons. “He was on the swim team just last week.”

“Well, didn’t you say he was kicked off?”

“Yeah, but— yeah. Fuck. Would’ve just been nice to be free of him here.”  

Niall shrugs, offering miss Grass a quick _‘ey, your hair matches my tights, ain’t that funny?_ followed by a much, _much_ too loud laugh for what the quip was worth, at which she bares her teeth and forces her shoulders to vibrate so as to look like she’s laughing too. She looks utterly relieved when Niall turns back to Louis.

“He’s always in here anyway. Harry Styles. Every single day of the week if he can manage. Well, not so much lately, since he’s been ill or whatever the fuck’s been going on with him, but he’s here a lot, still. You don’t get that buff just from sitting on your arse, smoking weed and watching ancient episodes of Naruto while chowing down Milky Ways and non-diet coke.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“Hey, I didn’t mention any names,” Niall lifts his hands in defense, “ _you_ took that to describe yourself. Says more about _your_ self-esteem than anything that you’d just automatically assume—”  

“You literally walked in on me just last night doing _exactly_ all of tho— nevermind.” Louis shakes his head. “Nevermind.”

“Anyway, you’d better get used to seeing him round here. If you wanna get buff, like you said last night after you’d borrowed my scale and ran out crying—”

“I did not run out cry—”

“-- then you’d better get used to seeing him round here. You can’t get buff just from lifting a bit on Thursdays. You’ve got to put more hours in. You’ve got to be coming here at the very least as often as Harry Styles does if you want to gain any slight bit of muscle mass before end of term.”

Louis feels his own bicep. “Well, I’ve already got a decent amount to start off with.”

Niall barks a screaming laugh, slapping himself on his tightly tighted thighs, then wanders off toward the treadmills.

Louis decides to warm up on his own. Fetching a jump rope, he positions himself in the farthest corner of the room and starts to jump. He trips himself within two jumps and lands with his nose on someone’s toes.

“You all right?” the guy asks.

It’s one of the loud boys, the tall-ish one with the wide shoulders, wide nose and brown eyes. He talks a lot it seems, but never loud enough that Louis’ ever heard his actual voice over any of the other loud boys. He has a pleasant looking face, one of those which you wouldn’t ever in a million years expect to cause you any intentional harm, but Louis prepares himself for a mean-spirited mocking regardless; he _is_ one of Harry Styles’ friends, after all.

“I’m fine.”

The guy chuckles a bit, while Louis scrambles to get up, and it sounds as though he’s about to say something when another two loud boys join him, snickering. One of them is taller than Pleasant Face, dark-haired and squinty-eyed, the other is shorter, ginger-haired and of the slightly… fluffier variety.

“Fuckin’ hell, mate, aren’t people like you supposed to be good at that shit?” the tall one asks.

Louis gathers the jump rope up in his hands, deciding he’s done with that for today. “What do you mean?”

“Just, like—” he laughs as another loud boy joins him, one with blonde Justin Biebery hair and a disproportionately large mouth, and then another, with tattoos all up his arms and a jaw like he could crush bricks between his teeth. “Aren’t little girls supposed to be good at jump skipping and that?”

The boys all burst out laughing.

“Oh, piss off,” Louis mutters, throwing the rope off toward the shelf he took it off and marching off, the back of his neck burning as the group no doubt watches him, still snickering, muttering stuff.

He plops down in the seat of what he thinks is a chest-press machine, but the guy by his side, another loud boy, he thinks, starts laughing at him soon as he tries to push the handles forward.

“Think you’re supposed to adjust the weight according to your own physical limits, pal,” he says, grinning like he’s fighting not to burst out laughing harder. “Let me give you a hand.”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll—”

The guy reaches down, fixing the weights, then gestures for Louis to push again.

“What’ve you done?”

“Nothing. Just fixed yours weights according to what you seem physically able to push.”

Louis glares at him for another few seconds, then turns and starts to push. His arms swing forward, the machine giving a huge _pling!_ , making most every head in the room turn his way. The loud boys from before have already gathered around the machine on his other side, barking loud laughs, bantering back and forth with the guy who ‘fixed his weights’ like Louis isn’t sitting right between them. Like he’s thin air with occasional entertainment value.

“Ha. Ha,” Louis says dryly. “Fucking hilarious, that. Not putting any weights on at all. That’s a bloody masterpiece right there, you should drop the A levels and go straight into the entertainment business, mate, you’re fucking made for it.”

The guy just looks him over like he’s some kind of rare, slightly gross-looking animal, then bursts out laughing again. “Isn’t she cuuuute,” he sings, reaching out and grabbing Louis’ cheek, pinching it hard and ruffling his face around harder. “All stroppy when she’s got her period.”

The loud boys laugh harder, the weight-fucker laughs harder, everyone laughs except for Louis. For an insane second he considers fighting them all, but then he remembers that, as little as he does feel it right at this particular moment, he would sort of like to continue living.

So he jumps out of his chair and marches off.

“You done already?” a voice rumbles from the punching bag as he crosses diagonally through the room toward the door, “hardly got much of a workout in, did you?”

“Fuck off!” Louis whirls around, pointing a finger at Harry, who’s slouching against the punching bag, eyes half-lidded, smile lazy and infuriating, “fuck the fuck off, I’m not fucking scared of you, mum’s boy!”

In a split-second, Harry’s entire face hardens. “Do not fucking mention my mum!” he screams, like some absolutely ridiculous tough-guy parody. Except he means it. Everything about the look in his eyes says he means it and Louis - Louis apparently didn’t mean it quite as much when he said he wasn’t scared of him.

He backs up. “All right, all right, calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” he charges forward and Louis stumbles backwards. “You do not _ever_ fucking mention my mum, you understand that? You do not _ever_ —”

Louis glances to his side, where miss Grass is fucking missing, the green-haired traitor, then back at Harry, face blood-red and twitching with anger.

He spins on his heel and runs out of the room like his arse is on fire, not missing the violent roar of loud boy-laughter that ensues.

So. The curly-haired night runner owns this fucking school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to note that the time period in this "universe" is intentionally ambiguous, which is why certain behaviours are considered "acceptable" in here, which obviously wouldn't be today.


	5. Chapter 5

The part which he doesn’t understand, he thinks as he slams open his bedroom-door and flings himself at his bed, is that he didn’t break the promise he made Harry Styles just last week. He didn’t break it at all. He kept his mouth shut, even around Niall, even when they got so stoned last Sunday that he started jabbering about his imaginary childhood-friend, Bernie. He hasn’t so much as _thought_ about snitching on Harry Mum’s Boy Styles; mostly, if he’s thought about him, it’s been to think up elaborate ways to avoid him at all costs.

No part of him, however much being emasculated like he was when Frogface tipped him halfway out of a fourth floor-window does infuriate him, has harboured the slightest desire to snitch on Harry Styles. The consequences just wouldn’t have been worth it.

And yet—

“He’s _still_ got all his tough boys coming after me.”

“Wha’?” Niall gasps. He’s just crashed into Louis’ room and is now clinging to the jamb, panting like he’s attempted to outrun Usain Bolt, “still wha’?”

“You all right, mate?”

Niall nods, bending over to cling to his thighs, trying to catch his breath. “Yeah, hh.. just… hhh… ran…” He ends up flattening out on Louis’ carpet, rolling onto his back with a groan and squirming, going crimson, as he tries to rid his too-tight tights.

Louis sighs, getting up. He grabs the fabric around the ankles, pulling and pulling, until he’s gone crimson too, sweating more than he’s ever done in any gym. When the tights finally do give, it’s with a snap, and Louis plonks backwards onto the bed, skull knocking the wall behind him.

“Fucking hell.” He ducks his head, rubbing the sore back of it. “I’m making an irrevocable decision here, mate; these tights shall never, ever be worn by you, ever again. They’re becoming a danger, not only to yourself and your intestines, but also to the people around you.”

“Right, but—”

“No, please don’t argue me on this.” Louis throws a hand out dismissively, shaking his down-turned head. “You’re blind to the damaging effects these tights have on you.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Please don’t make me have to stage an intervention, Niall, you—”

“Mate, you yanked my pants off with ‘em!”

Louis looks up. Niall’s lying down still, propped up by his elbows, flaccid pink-headed dick out on full display.

“Oh.” He picks the wretched neon-green things up again, finding a pair of little white briefs snug inside of them, sunny-side up. When he’s peeled them out of there, because for some inexplicable reason his brain’s decided it’d rather pick Niall’s nasty knickers up by his bare hands than just throw him the tights back, he hurls them at Niall and they land on his face.

“Oi, Liam! Come and see this, them two bum-bandits didn’t even bother closing the door!”

It’s Squinty Eyes, pulling Pleasant Fuckface along by the arm. They’ve followed Louis and Niall up here, which makes Louis think Harry Styles might be on his way too, and, however little he’d like to ever admit it to himself, let alone anyone else, that does scare him just a bit. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen someone get so riled up so quickly over something as insignificant as being called a mum’s boy before in his life. He wouldn’t like to see how violent an _actual_ insult might make someone like that and he doesn’t trust himself not to accidentally blurt one out when faced with Harry Styles’ punch-worthy mug.

“Get the fuck out!” he therefore shouts, jumping off his bed and launching his whole body weight at the door to slam it shut.

Niall, who’s stumbled back into his little white briefs, turns to Louis’ dresser, announcing, “I’m borrowing a pair of your trousers, mate. Not walking out of your room half-naked.”

“Right.” Louis rubs at his shoulder, sore from how hard he slammed it into the door. “Right, no, that probably wouldn’t help the whole ’school faggot’ situation either.”

Niall just chuckles, head ducked down as he searches for a pair half-decent trousers.

It’s about an hour after Louis’ escaped the gym to hide in his room that he hears the rest of the loud boys coming down the hall again. Squinty and Fuckface went back down once banging Louis’ door and riling each other’s cocks up with feral sex-noises got boring, and Louis hasn’t left his room since.

He’s hungry as all hell, missed out on snack-time, and dinner’s approaching, which he couldn’t skip even if he wanted to, obligatory and all. He waits out the loud boys as the banter fizzles and the doors get ripped and slammed around him. There’s a small space of time where they’ll be getting themselves a shower before dinner, and in that small space Louis will be able to run down to Niall’s room or, if he isn’t there, just directly down to the dining hall. If the dining hall then isn’t open, or if it is, but Niall isn’t in there yet, there’s a particular corner right by the doors where he can hide while he waits. He’s done it twice before, although he’s never even told Niall, not because he’s afraid Niall might find him pathetic for it, but rather because he wouldn’t like to hear himself say something as pathetic as that out loud.

Louis never did have many friends, never any that stuck for very long at a time, but it never really bothered him unless people bothered him about it. As long as he doesn’t mention the fact that he’s got nowhere else to sit at mealtimes but with Niall - who he’s still pretty certain is utterly and completely indifferent to whether he’s around or not - he’s all right; he doesn’t really think about it. 

He certainly wouldn’t like to be friends with the likes of Harry Styles and his loud boys. Better off being on his own, then.

So. He stands with his ear to his bedroom door for three minutes straight, making sure every last one of them’s gone to the showers, then finally sneaks out of there, quiet as can be.

He walks directly into Harry Styles.

“Shit!”

Harry’s bag falls to the floor, his phone and keys too, clattering loudly against one another, and Harry Styles’ eyes blow wide at the sight of it, then even wider when he looks up and realises that the catastrophe happened at the hand of his arch-nemesis. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

Louis stumbles backwards. “I’ve, I’m, I—” he begins to lean down, thinking he might save himself from an epic beat-down by helping Harry pick his stuff up, but it’s an idiotic idea considering their track-record and it’s pretty much his own fault when he gets shoved directly onto his arse again.

“Fuck off,” Harry hisses, scraping his shit off the floor and into the bag, “seriously, just— stop making everything fucking worse on yourself, I’m having to strain not to beat the living shit out of you all the bloody time, it’s exhausting.”

Louis huffs sharply out through his nostrils, keeping quiet despite himself, and stays on the floor, waiting for Harry Styles to pass him. He’s exceptionally slow in his movements, though, taking what feels like half a minute just to raise himself from a bent-over position and straighten up again, and in the split-second his face hovers right across from Louis’, Louis gets a terribly good look at the severity of things; the slight bit of bettering he’d seen under Harry’s eyes after the nap he took in Louis’ room last week has regressed itself, skin now bulging and saggy, a bruised-looking purplish colour sharply contrasting the rest of his frail white face. His eyes are bloodshot, lids swollen, blinks so slow Louis fears he’s falling asleep again every time they close.

“Just leave me be and I’ll do you the same favour,” Louis mutters when he does finally haul himself up to stand.

Harry licks over his lips, not sparing him a look. “I’d have left you be if you’d kept your promise.”

“I _did_ , I didn’t tell anyone,” Louis exclaims, and when Harry shrugs a shoulder like he isn’t going to bother arguing something he already knows is a blatant lie, Louis raises his voice and repeats, “I didn’t fucking tell anyone. I swear, I fucking— why would I tell anyone? What motive could I _possibly_ —”

“Attention.”

Louis laughs. “Oh, that’s just fucking _insulting_. I don’t want attention, I just want to be left the fuck alone.”

Harry looks down at him. “I was pulled aside by Miss Till,” he drawls, “the day after I’d— well, you know. Last Friday, before I was supposed to go home on weekend. She pulled me aside and asked if I was having trouble sleeping or feeling ill or depressed or anything. Had to give her a bloody piss test as well, it was humiliating, I had to stay here for the weekend cause it got me all out of it, I couldn’t go home like that,” he closes his eyes for an odd second, then re-opens them, brows arching, “and this was the _day_ after we’d— I’d been in your room. The _day_ after. You fucking snitch.”

“I’m not a fucking snitch,” Louis throws his arms out, “what do you want me to say, I didn’t tell anyone, I’m not a fucking snitch.”

Harry scoffs. “Right, so it’s just a complete coincidence that the _day_ after I—”

“Yeah, it’s a fucking coincidence, Styles!” Louis shouts, and Harry’s eyes snap properly open, but only for a second before they give up and fall back to being permanently half-lidded again, “sorry,” Louis mutters, not because he means it or doesn’t lose every ounce of pride saying it, but rather because he doesn’t want to lose his beautiful face getting his nose punched into his skull for not doing it, “sorry for shouting, but seriously, mate, I didn’t tell on you. And, with all due respect, is it really _that_ much of a long shot that she might’ve drawn her own conclusions just from, I don’t know,” once single glance at the wrecked fucking state of you, “Miss Flack having to save you from drowning and that?”

Harry’s eyes narrow, his teeth scraping out over his chapped bottom lip. Then he swallows down the start of a yawn and moves his gaze away, somewhere up above Louis’ head, muttering, “well, anyway, I didn’t say anything to the boys that doesn’t seem like the truth regardless.”

“What did you say to them?” Louis begins to pull himself back up to stand, slowly, because he still doesn’t quite trust Harry Styles not to spontaneously blow up on him, “huh?”

Harry’s eyes glide down him, then up again and away, quickly. “Just that you seem to be a bit of a…”

“A bit of a _what_ , Harry?”

Harry scratches at his lip. “Just, you know,” he murmurs, cold eyes meeting Louis’ again, “you seem to be a bit on the,” his gaze drops to Louis’ wrists, then goes up again, “dainty side of things.”

Louis groans exasperatedly. “You been going round calling me a bender, then, is that it?”

“Just calling it like it is,” Harry says, “I know one when I see one.”

“What, cause you are one?”

Harry’s half-smile drops. “Fuck off.” He hitches his bag up, takes a step away, then throws a hard glance over his shoulder, “just looking out for my mates. Making sure you don’t go around secretly perving on them in the showers.”

“What, cause if they’re worried about me they might not notice you while you’re at it?”

Harry’s eyes snap open again, his nostrils flaring out. He charges forward, but just as he does, one of the loud boys, Fuckface that is, pops his head out from down the end of the hall, “oi, Haz, there’s a shower free if you wanna go, hurry!”

Harry takes a deep breath in through his nostrils, jaw pushed out, and keeps Louis’ gaze trained for another two seconds. Then he turns and walks away. Once he’s disappeared behind a closed door, Louis bends in on himself, clutching his thighs and letting his eyes fall shut as he breathes again.

 

 

*

 

Fuckface, or Liam Payne as others seem to prefer to call him, reveals exactly what it is that’s been making everyone shoot Louis dirty glances and, the braver ones, shout and throw things at him, the following day during English. He’s sitting right in front of Louis beside a bumped-up year eleven, and either he doesn’t realise that Louis’ sitting within earshot or else, which is also quite likely, he just doesn’t care. Either way, he explains, in pathetic amounts of enthusiasm, how Harry Styles described Louis _luring him into his room to see his ‘spray deodorant-collection’_ (which, what the fuck) and then repeatedly attempting to _touch his bits and tug at his trousers_.

It’s all Louis can do not to throw a skull-punch at the back of Liam’s head, imagining it to be Harry’s, of course, and instead just quietly crack a pencil in half under the table. It’s his only pencil, sadly, and when he asks to borrow one from the guy next to him he gets called a _pervy bastard_ , before the guy moves his entire table half a foot further away from him.

Needless to say, when Louis gets back up to his hall that Friday afternoon, he’s got a shitload of English to catch up on and a shitload of frustrations to punch out, preferably at a curly-haired, sleep-deprived, night-running target.

“Yeah, but we’ll just, uhm…” Speak of the devil. “Just, uhm… uhm… just, uhm…”

He’s coming out of the bathrooms with two of the other loud boys and they begin to speak over him as his sentence drowns out and fades away. His gaze is on the floor, shoulders hunched, arms dangling down like over-cooked spaghetti’s.

Louis realises he’s stopped attempting to unlock his door just to stare, and quickly turns back around, pressing the key in. He’s still fiddling with it, unnerved, when the two other blokes have sauntered on down the hall and Harry’s the only one left, moving over to his own door.

Finally, Louis unlocks his door, but then he still can’t help his curious self from staying still for another few seconds just to glance to his left.

“The fuck are you looking at?” Harry Styles immediately asks, which is quite ironic considering he’d been staring at Louis since before Louis even turned his head. He’s slouched himself up against his door, face pressed sideways, eyes near-closed, and he’s just sort of lazily... watching. Studying.

It’s unnerving. “Could ask you the same thing.”

“Bored,” Harry replies, voice not much more than a low crackle, “dunno where my key is.”

“Perhaps - and this is a really wild guess, so bear with me here - just _perhaps_ ,” Louis says, making eyes at him, “you’ve got it in your pocket?”

Harry glances down his front pockets, mouth drooping.

“Back one.”  

He slaps back at his skinny-jeaned arse, striking gold on the right cheek. “Oh.” He pulls it out, attempts to stuff it into the hole, but misses tremendously. Then he scratches the key at the door a bit and mutters, “why were you even looking at my arse?”

Oh, _christ_. “Fuckin’ hell, this is becoming really repetitive, mate,” Louis sighs, “if you want to hurt me, at least come up with something new once in a while, jab a little deeper, you know? The ‘ew, gay’ thing gets a bit old after a while, don’t you think?”

Harry just blinks at him, painfully slow. “Faggot.”

“Right, okay. Nice, original, kudos to you, then,” Louis says, which earns the weirdest, toothiest, most empty-eyed smile in response. “What are you even still doing here, anyway? Thought you ran home to mummy every weekend?”

The smile drops right off. “Every _other_ weekend,” Harry snarls, “except I couldn’t last cause of you so now I’ve gotta wait till the next one.”

“You must be dying inside,” Louis snorts, as he watches Harry press his forehead into the door and attempt at unlocking it once more, miserably. “Two whole weeks without mummy, that’s just simply not survivable.”

“Yeah, well, sorry I wasn’t sent off here cause my parents couldn’t be bothered having me around and don’t give a shit if I never come back again.”

Louis’ jaw slackens. He stares at the side of Harry’s face, hand jittering around his door handle, for several seconds before Harry finally looks at him, expression mildly amused. “What?”

“Nothing, I just— I just, I think I realise where I’ve seen your face before now,” Louis says, “you look like your mum.”

Harry brows draw closer and he straightens up a bit. “How do you know my mum?”

“Oh, Harry,” Louis smiles saccharinely, blood boiling inside, “everyone knows your mum. Quite well, I should say,” he cocks his head back, smiling wider, “she’s such an excellent, _excellent_ lay.”  

And— it happens so fast he doesn’t realise what it was until he’s on the floor, clutching his jaw. Harry’s over him in a second, dropping down and punching him again, hard on the sore point of his arm, then in his gut, twice, at which he groans out in pain, crumbling into a ball on the carpet.

“Do not fucking talk about my mum,” Harry’s growls, getting up again, and Louis screws his eyes shut, lifting his arms to shield his face. Harry takes advantage, kicking him in the gut again. “Do not,” he kicks again, this time between the ribs, all air knocking right out of Louis and he’s gasping, whimpering, “ _fucking_ ,” Harry kicks him once more, lighter, but still enough that Louis gives a strangled nose, curling up further, “talk about my mum.”

Harry marches off then and Louis stays on the floor for a while, coughing and spluttering and clutching his own stomach.

 

*

 

He stays in his room for the rest of the day, feigning sick and hiding his punched jaw under a scarf when Miss Till comes up and asks why he wasn’t at dinner. He doesn’t tell her what happened because, however humiliated and sore and possibly ruptured inside he is, he also _isn’t a fucking snitch_.

Niall smuggles some dinner up for him later anyway, and Louis does confide in him. He doesn’t react much, other than rolling Louis up some of his strongest stuff and reminding him that it’s always best to keep a low profile and never, ever, under any circumstances, snitch on anyone. He goes to bed around ten and Louis smokes his joint alone on the fire escape. It’s some really, _really_ strong stuff, he realises quickly, and then keeps puffing away, mending the pain of his bruised jaw and arm and stomach and ego.

Therefore, as he sits out there, utterly stoned, he can’t be entirely sure of his eyesight. But, if he _isn’t_ just seeing blurry specks of nothing, if he _is_ in fact seeing what he thinks he’s seeing, then what he’s seeing is a group of boys, in the dark of the night, sprinting across the field down toward the forest. Like the night-runner, times twelve.

He doesn’t see them again for hours and in the end he just goes to bed, foggy-headed, sore-punched and utterly confused.


	6. Chapter 6

“I’m telling you, I saw at least twelve of them running down toward the woods last night,” Louis tells Niall when they’re sitting in his room Saturday afternoon, sharing a bottle of Jack that Niall pulled from under his bed.

Niall barks a laugh. “That shit I gave you must’ve been stronger than I remembered.”

“No, I— no, seriously, I think I saw what I think I saw.”

“Well, obviously.” Niall looks at him blankly. “You think you saw it, so you think you saw it.”

“No, but— but— no, you’re getting me wrong.” Louis takes the bottle off his hands, having a swig before trying again; “I think that I _did_ in fact see what it is that I think that I… saw.”

“Wha’?”

Louis sighs, lifting the bottle back up. “Nevermind.”

Niall cackles.

The rest of the Saturday, he and Niall stay in Niall’s room, getting themselves half-buzzed and then toking up on the fire-escape when they run out of drink. Before dinner, Niall runs down to Louis’ room and picks up a couple spray-deodorants for them to cover the scent of whiskey and weed. It works all right, it seems, but that could just be due to the fact that, as always, they eat in the corner of the dining hall, at a table by themselves, pressed close to the wall. It used to embarrass Louis a bit, make him feel as though he was shying away from the rest of the student population for no reason other than fear of rejection; well, it doesn’t anymore. Now he’s seen enough of the population to know that it doesn’t get much better than Niall - and, of course, the mute year eleven-kid who insists on sitting four seats over from them at all times.  

After dinner, he hurries back to his room fast as he can, before the slurs people throw at him in passing turn to food, spit or punches.

 

*

 

He nods off ten minutes into a pathetic attempt at reading up on coursework and doesn’t wake again until it’s pitch-black out and his phone tells him it’s five past three am. He’s forgotten to close his window, rain now pouring in and onto school-books lying open on his desk.

“ _Shit_.”

He jumps up, stumbling in the jeans he’d pushed halfway down his legs, too tight over his stomach while he slept. He leaps over the desk, shoving the window closed. Just as he stands there, fumbling with the tight old handles, something catches his eye; something on it’s way back up from the forest.

He pushes his books aside, careful not to rip the damp paper, and crawls up onto his desk. The rain clashes against the pane, blurring the already much too dark picture he’s getting, so he opens the window again, dipping down and sticking his head out. He sits there, fully sober, not so much as a little bit stoned, and watches intently. It’s not the night-runner; it’s a whole flock of them. They’re running, laughing, stumbling and falling, they’re shushing each other and giggling, trying to keep calm once they reach closer to the building, trying to quiet down, but it’s impossible, because they can’t quiet down, it’s not in their nature, because— because they’re the loud boys.

It’s all of the loud boys.

They reach the building and disappear under Louis’ window, and Louis sits for a moment, face wet with rain, studying the dark outlines of the forest in the distance, treetops swaying in the storm. There’s nothing to see behind it, no sign of road or building or civilization; there’s only the forest and nothing beyond it, as far as reaches the eye.

A door opens, voices and feet toppling down the hall. Louis pulls back into his room, closing the window again. The boys all mutter to each other, laughing under their breaths, and Louis wonders, seriously considers, what would happen if he walked out there now and asked _where have you guys been?_ and _what’s so funny about it?_ , but, however much his curious nature attempts to convince him otherwise, the answer is; they wouldn’t tell him a fucking thing. At best, they’d call him a faggot and then ignore his existence. At worst, they’d—

And Louis’ already got enough bruises left from the last time he got beat up in that hall so that isn’t a risk he’s in the mood to take. He stays in his room.

 

*

 

When he tells Niall what he saw the following morning, Niall laughs and asks whether he’s prone to nightmares and or hallucinations, and when Louis in turn asks whether Niall’s prone to sleep-induced deafness since there’d be no other possible explanation as to why he didn’t hear them all coming back last night, Niall says _well, I was so stoned before bed I passed out in the middle of a wank at my desk, wouldn’t have woke if a bomb went off_ and then Louis goes off on a rant about how all the porn-sites have been blocked by the school and how free porn should constitute as a basic human right and then he sort of forgets what he was talking about. 

At breakfast, though, the loud boys do all look as though they haven’t slept a single second all night, and afterwards they all head straight up to their rooms to sleep, if the incredible silence in the hall is any indicator.

Louis takes advantage of that and goes and has his first shower since Harry Styles made him the constant, unwarranted target of loud boy-homophobia, the bathroom completely vacant save for himself.

Of course, the second he steps out of his shower-cubicle, it isn’t anymore.

“Oh, great,” Harry Styles sighs, back facing Louis, eyes zeroing in on him in the mirror, “you.”

“Hey, it’s your old friend, Snitchy McFaggot, you love me, remember? Came to catch a glance of me in the showers, didn’t you?” Louis responds, only because he’s been deprived of human contact ever since Niall joined in on the sleeping-all-day-thing and locked himself in his room and, well, because it’s mildly entertaining to watch that big git go from zero to sixty in less than two seconds.

However much the arm-punch he receives in return does sting.

“Quit staring at me,” Harry Styles mutters, as he’s turned back to the mirror again, shaving non-existent facial hair with a little pink razor. “What are you doing here anyway, you never shower.”

“Wow.” Louis laughs dryly, crossing his arms over his chest and stifling a wince when he accidentally squeezes his sore-punched arm, “sunk that low, have we? Hygiene-jokes?”

“It’s no joke, mate, I could smell you from down the other end of the hall.”

“I’ve literally _just_ showered.”

Harry shrugs a shoulder. “Just calling it like it is. You smell.”

“‘You smell’? Seriously? That’s kindergarten-material, mate.”

Harry’s eyes glide from himself and over to Louis in the mirror. “How’s that arm feel? If it’s not too sore, I’d love to change that for you.”

Louis rolls his eyes. The arm is sore. Bruised and much, much too sore. “Why aren’t you sleeping like the rest of your mates? I saw you all coming back up from your forest gangbang last night.”

For a second, Harry stills, gaze locked on Louis. Then he drops it, flicking on the faucet to wash wasted shaving-cream off of his little pink razor. “Listen, Lewis — that was your name, right, Lewis?”

“Oh, fuck off—”

“Listen, anyway, Lewis,” Harry speaks through, voice soft, saccharine, “I know you’ve fallen into the habit of stalking me everywhere that I go and, like… I don’t know if it’s you trying to live your social life vicariously through me, but I’d, uhm— I guess I’d just really appreciate it if you’d respect yourself enough to at least just try— just _try_ , I know it’s hard - to make the infatuation slightly less obvious. It’s… embarrassing to watch.”

“ _I’m_ embarrassing to watch?” Louis’ eyes widen, roamingthe deep purple indents under Harry’s eyes, the rotten banana-like shape of his back, the slight bit of something under his left nostril which must be the only thing keeping him awake right now.

He sniffles loudly, fake and for show.

“What?” Harry rasps.

“Oh, nothing, I just— I just, I guess I just sniffled cause I picked up on your habits. Is that- ehm— sorry, is that powdered sugar under your nose? No offense, I just, I just really love powdered sugar, that’s all. Did mummy send you that in a care package or?”

Harry whirls around, razor hitting the ground, and Louis leaps for the door, sprinting down the hall as he’s chased, only one or two feet ahead. Harry’s fingers graze his back just before he reaches his door, which he, thanks to higher powers, forgot to lock. He jumps into his room, spins around and slams the door shut.

Well, _almost_ slams it shut; Harry Styles screams.

Four long fingers sit crammed between the frame and the door, twitching. Louis rips the door back open, then slams it before thinking, locking it immediately.

“My hand!” comes another scream from behind the door, “you broke my fucking hand!”

“Well, go down to the nurse’s, then!” Louis half-yells, half-mutters, teeth nipping at his thumb-nail. He hates Harry Styles, but he also kind of hates the idea of having just smashed a right-handed person’s right hand to complete uselessness. “Seriously, do it! Now!”

“If it’s broken, I’m fucking killing you,” Harry shouts, and then his feet thump away.

“Don’t forget to wipe under your nose before you go in there!” 

 

*

 

Niall looks horrified when Louis tells him what happened the following day at breakfast, but then the mute year eleven-kid sneezes and farts at the same time and he forgets all about it.

“Is there a word for when that happens?” he asks after five full minutes of insanely loud laughter - not at all fitting for a person who values the keeping of low profiles as much as Niall Horan insists that he does. “When you sneeze and fart at the same time?”

Louis glances to his side to find the mute kid now wiping sneezed-out snot from the edge of his plate by the sleeve of his sweater. He turns back to his own plate. “Shart? No, wait, that’s when you think you’re farting, but then you shit yourself instead.”

“Right, yeah, I hate when that happens. Snart, then? A sneeze-fart?”

“Hm… maybe,” Louis pushes his plate away, appetite long gone, “what about— flatuleeze? Like, explosive flatuleezing? That’s got to be a thing.”

“Yeah, my uncle suffered from that.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, chronically. Although that wasn’t what killed him.”

“What killed him, then?”

“Acute vomitory dhiarroeezing.”

“What’s that, exactly?”

“A messy business, that’s what.”

Louis laughs, dropping his head and shaking it. “Fuckin’ hell.”

“Hey, don’t swear like that, I’m trying to eat.”

“You’re mental, you know that?”

“I’m not the one breaking people’s hands and making up fake stories about night-running and shit.”

Louis gets up. “Thanks for breakfast and you’re a dick.” He pushes his chair out, turns to leave, then turns back around, because he feels a need to, “and he deserved it, by the way - the broken hand. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

He wouldn’t, really. In fact he feels a terrible twist of guilt and, admittedly mostly, fear in his gut when he walks out of the dining hall and finds Harry Styles coming toward him, hand wrapped up in bandage.

“Is it broken?” he asks, inching close to the wall as they begin pass one another.

“Have I killed you?”

Louis glances down his very much still alive self, “no, I suppose you—”

“So, then it’s probably not broken.”

 

*

 

Three days later, on a Thursday, after Louis’ been to his first round of footie practice - heading down to the gym again after what happened last week didn’t seem like a particularly good idea - Louis bumps into Harry in the bathrooms again, just the two of them and no one else. And the reason that it’s just the two of them and no one else is really quite simple; it’s three o’clock at night.

Louis’ just come out of the shower-cubicle - showering in the daytime means getting his clothes, towel and dignity stolen so he prefers waking himself at arse o’clock at night to have the place to himself. Of course, he’d neglected to factor in the issue of Harry Styles and his sleep-patterns, or lack thereof. So, naturally, he’s standing out here now, at three am, brushing his teeth.

“All right, seriously, this whole stalking-thing’s getting out of hand,” he drawls.

“Speaking of hand, that bandage came off rather quick, didn’t it?” Louis nods at Harry’s unwrapped, albeit still slightly bruised, hand. “All for show or what? You strike me as the type who’d wear a pretend-bandage just for pity-points.”

Harry takes the brush from his mouth and spits. Instead of lifting his head again, he presses it to the mirror across from him, just resting his forehead there, breathing slowly. He’s gripping the sink with one hand, fingers tapping the underside of it restlessly, and he puts his toothbrush down with the other, lifting it to his chest.

He’s clutching his heart.

Carefully, Louis steps up to the sink beside him, leaning in ever so discreetly to have a closer look at him. “How much of that stuff do you do a day?”

“Piss off.” Harry sniffles hard, then wipes angrily at his nose with the back of his hand. His fingers are shaking again, badly so. His eyes are closed, lashes laying thick and twitchy over his skin, “I don’t, I— I don’t always, I just, I— ungh.”

He presses his lips together, taking an unsteady breath in through his nostrils. He pats at his heart, a bit frantic.

“Harry,” Louis says without thinking, “you all right?” Harry’s eyes squeeze further shut, his mouth too, and Louis steps a bit closer, can’t help it, “s’your heart racing?”

“Piss off.”

“Is it? Is it racing?”

Harry huffs, then nods after a beat. “Bit.”

His voice is small, so soft compared to anything he ever directs at Louis that Louis feels okay stepping a bit closer, gently prying his hand off of his chest and replacing it with his own. Harry’s eyes shoot open, his mouth too, and Louis quickly blurts; “calm down, you bender, I’m just checking to see if you’re dying.”

Harry’s got on his thick school sweater and a button-down underneath, so Louis can’t get a proper feel at all.

“Does it hurt?” he asks.

Harry, who’d had his head tipped back, eyes on the ceiling, just to cope with having Louis close and not bashing his nose in, presumably, looks down again. He swallows. “No,” he says, and when Louis tilts his head a bit, “little bit.”

“How long? How long s’it felt like that?”

“Just— I don’t know, I— I just, I did another line and then I, I was just doing some jumping jacks and stuff, I don’t know, I’ve had this before, it’s not anything, it’s just… in my head, I think.”

Louis slips a hand up under his shirt. Harry’s hand flies up to grab him by his sore arm.

“Calm down,” Louis hisses, grabbing him back to hold him in place, “not having a grope, I promise. Just checking.”

He lays his hand out on Harry’s chest, warm under the thin fabric of his button-down, and neither speak for a while. His heart’s pounding into Louis’ hand, absolutely racing, but blow and anxiety would do that to a person, and Louis’ pretty certain asking Harry to go down and get checked with the nurse wouldn’t result in anything but a punch in the arm and Harry running off to hide in his room.

He steps back. “It’s fine,” he says, looking straight up at Harry, “feels fine to me, I mean. I’m no expert.”

“Yeah.” Harry swallows, adam’s apple bobbing hard. He nods a bit manically, scratching where Louis just had his hand, “yeah.”

“Why don’t you ever sleep?”

The slight bit of softness dissolves from Harry’s expression. He drops his gaze, shakes his head. “I sleep,” he mutters, “and it’s none of your fucking business.” He picks his toothbrush off the side of the sink, but doesn’t move to leave. “And why are you up in the middle of the night, anyway?”

“Cause you’ve got all your mates making my life a living hell,” Louis says earnestly.

Harry’s head snaps up. He looks at Louis for a long moment, brows furrowed. His pupils are so dilated Louis can’t hardly catch a glimpse of green at all. His hair’s wet, like he’s been running his entire head under the faucet, near-black and all smoothed back from his face save for a few little curls starting to spring up around the edges.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice cracking in the middle of it, mouth beginning to tremble, “if I go back into my room right now, I’m either going to fall asleep or I’m going to have to do another line,” he half-whispers, eyes welling up, “and I can’t go to sleep, so it’s going to end up being the coke. And if it’s the coke then I’m afraid I’m— I’m afraid, Louis.”

Louis nods, just slightly taken aback that Harry actually does know his real name. “Why don’t you go night-running, then?”

“I can’t,” he says, “I don’t really do that, anyway. Anymore.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I see you.”

“I wouldn’t lie,” Harry says, “about that. I’d have no reason to.”

Louis drops his head, sighing exasperatedly. It’s three am on a fucking school night and this is too much for his brain to work with. But he can’t leave Harry like this. Harry won’t go to the nurse’s, no matter what Louis says, and, despite having a shitload of friends, Harry doesn’t seem to have confided in anyone other than Louis, right now.

Perhaps _because_ they aren’t friends. Perhaps just because Louis caught him in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“I don’t know, ehm— I don’t really know what to do with this, Harry. I could tell you to go down and wake a staff-member or something, but—”

“Yeah, forget it,” Harry pushes past him, “fucking forget it,” he says, voice raspy, broken, “don’t tell anyone.”

He marches out of the room and Louis stays back.

It’s been about two minutes of pacing the bathroom before Louis leaves there, and then an additional five of pacing the hall before he finally stops. In front of Harry’s door.

It takes a whole minute of relentless knocking before the door gets opened.

“What?” Harry hisses, and even though he’s only opened the door just enough to poke his head out, Louis manages to peek over his shoulder and catch a glimpse of his powdered sugar, lined up on the backside of a vinyl sleeve, ready for consumption.

“What if you came and slept in my room?” Louis sighs, “would that make a difference?”

Harry bites his lip. “Not if you think that—”

“Oh, get the fuck over yourself, I’m not out to bugger you in your bloody sleep. Forget it, then.”

Louis turns and walks a few steps away, but doesn’t miss the fact that Harry’s door stays ajar, and that he seems to be rummaging round in his room, stashing the drugs away. A minute later, he comes out of there, duvet and pillow in hand. He ends up laying down on top of Louis’ bedspread on the floor and, although it looks rather uncomfortable, nodding off the second his head hits the pillow.

Louis lies awake for a bit after that, only half for fear of getting strangled the second he closes his eyes.


	7. Chapter 7

He wakes again around six-ish, then dips in and out of sleep until quarter past seven. The morning-sun is up, mild and mostly obstructed by thin grey clouds and the rain, softly pattering the window-pane. Outside in the hall, people are groaning and grumbling and yawning, lazily jogging up and down the hall, cramming in quick douches before breakfast.

In here, Harry Styles is snoring. He has been all night, or at least since Louis’ been awake, loudly and desperately so, sucking in every last bit of sleep like a ravenousbaby lion.

“Wakey,” Louis murmurs, pushing up on his elbows. “Wakey, wakey.”

He grabs his phone and kills his alarm just before it hits twenty past, where it’d normally go off. On an average morning, he’d be snoozing it until ten minutes to breakfast-time, but today isn’t an average morning. He hasn’t slept very well at all, and not just due to the snoring, nor the fear of getting strangled in his sleep -  although that’s been very real too. He hasn’t slept well because he’s been wondering. Constantly.

He knows it’s none of his business, really, whatever it is that’s eating Harry Styles, and that he’s probably better off keeping it that way for his own sake, but he can’t not wonder; he can’t kill the curiosity.

“Grhm,” Harry grunts, flopping over on the floor. He’s on his front now, face buried in his pillow, arms folded up under it. The duvet he brought in has been kicked down around his ankles and he’s still in button-down and sweater, legs bare save for a pair of little blue boxers.

“Wake up,” Louis mutters, “or else I’m going to open that door and leave you to explain why you slept on my floor last night,” he adds, and, when Harry doesn’t move; “ _I_ sure as fuck wouldn’t be able to.”

Still no sign of life, save for the snoring and the grunting and wild gasping for air when his face and nose have been buried in the pillow for too long.

“Well.” Louis throws a leg out of bed, not at all careful not to step on Styles, “I’m going for a piss.”

From within a toilet-stall, he overhears a couple of the loud boys muttering about where the hell Styles is and whether he’s died or something because it isn’t like him not to be up first thing in the morning. One of them is Liam Payne, who looks a tad bit worried when Louis slips out of the loo and tells him nothing.

When he arrives back to his bedroom, Harry is awake, giving Liam good reason to worry.

He’s lying on his side, clutching his pillow, eyes wide open, damp and red, nose sniffly, lips wobbling. He’s staring at his phone, tapping at it frantically, gasping in hiccupy little breaths through his nostrils.

“Oh, please don’t tell me you’re crying again,” Louis sighs, treading carefully around the big blubberer. “Sorry to be rude about it, mate, but seriously, what’s—”  

“Shut up.”

“All right, well. Fuck you too, then.”

Louis plops down on his bed again, picking his own phone up. He’s pretty certain he has no decent-smelling sweaters left in his drawers, seeing as he hasn’t been going down to the laundry-cellar at all yet, hasn’t even been there once, actually. He’s also not wearing trousers yet and he’s got to finish off some quick homework for first period, which he had an entire week to do, but that’s besides the point, and yet he stays in bed, watching Harry Styles out of the corner of his eye.

He’s sitting up now, leaning back against Louis’ nightstand, and Louis cranes his neck to read the phone-screen he’s tapping away at like he’s going to die if he doesn’t send an entire novel over text in the next half minute.

“Girlfriend?” Louis finds himself blurting.

Harry’s big thumbs still over the screen which Louis still can’t quite read without his glasses. “No,” he mutters, after a beat, “and stop stalking.”

If Harry’s voice were as firm as it tends to be, Louis would’ve snapped right back at him, told him that it really isn’t very wise to be acting rude toward someone who could easily get him kicked out of school for snorting coke on the premises, but it isn’t. It’s thin, shaky, and he’s still sniffling every other second, so Louis stays quiet.

For a second. “You going home today, then? Spend the weekend with mummy?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, so easily that Louis stops in his tracks, “miss her so, so much.”

He sounds genuine, openly vulnerable in a way Louis can’t even begin to understand that he’d choose to be in front of a half-stranger, if anyone at all, ever. “Oh. Right,” he mutters, leaning back against his headboard, “perhaps you should, ehm… talk to her about the sleeping issues and ehm— what is that about, anyway? The sleeping-thing? It’s really weird.”

Harry, who’s stopped sniffling for the most part, perhaps due to the pling his phone gave not half a minute ago, ticking in the message he’s probably re-read about six times at this point, mutters; “no.”

“No?”

“No.” Harry puts the phone down, finally, “I won’t talk to her about it,” he twists his neck, eyeing Louis, “and you won’t talk to anyone about it either. All right?”

Louis chuckles breathily. “All right, all right, no need to get threatening before breakfast.”

“Speaking of. I’m famished.”

Harry pushes off the floor, then begins to gather up his duvet and pillow without another word.

“Wow, hey, no, hang on a second,” Louis exclaims, “you’ve got to give me an explanation. About yesterday. You can’t just leave like this, you had a major breakdown last night and I’m still, like,  _insanely_ confused. Harry.” Louis snaps his fingers. “Harry.”

“ _What_?” Harry sighs, hitching his rolled-up duvet up in his arms and raising his brows a bit.

Louis raises his brows right back up at him. Harry might have more muscle- and manpower at his disposal, but Louis refuses to be intimidated by a seventeen-year-old boy who breaks down sobbing because he hasn’t seen his mum in two weeks; that’s just simply not an option. “What I said,” he says, “you’ve got to explain yourself. About last night.”

“I haven’t got to explain shit,” Harry replies, eyes gone cold again, condescending as if he wasn’t just crying on Louis’ floor, homesick like a nine-year-old on involuntary summer camp, “if you’ve, like…” he wipes at his snotty nose, “if you’ve got it into your head that I, like, owe you something now then you can stuff that because I don’t owe you shit.”

Louis closes his eyes, taking a second just to stifle his temper. “I never said you owed me anything,” he grits, “but you’re clearly gonna fuckin’ kill yourself with whatever it is that’s going on and, so far as I’ve seen, the only thing that’s helped at all has been sleeping in my room. Why that is, I’ve got no bloody idea. But I’d really fucking like to.”

Harry shifts weight, eyes darting down Louis’ face and up again. “Why do you care?”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?”

Louis groans. “Listen,” he sighs, “don’t get any of this twisted, I don’t like you, I really, really don’t fucking like you, at all. But— if I’m the only one who knows how bad of a state you’re in and I don’t do anything at all and you drop dead in two weeks time, then…” he shakes his head, gaze moving from Harry’s much too intense one and over to the wall behind him, “well, it’s mostly selfish. I couldn’t live with it if— you know.”

“You couldn’t live with it if I died?”

Louis’ gaze snaps back to him, fiery. “I _said_ , don’t get it twisted. It’s not that I care what happens to you. I don’t fucking care what happens to you.”

“So what is the point of this stupid fucking conversation?”

“Because— all right, well, if you’re not going to believe me that I’m not enough of a fucking sociopath to not want your death on my conscience, then let me put it differently.” Louis shrugs a shoulder. “Maybe we could be of helpto one another. A two-way street.”

Harry chews on the side of his mouth. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Louis begins, just as someone kicks at his door and shouts something incomprehensible and a whole lot of loud boy-laughter ensues. He raises a brow. “To start with, you could make your mates stop harassing me.”

“I’m not _telling_ them to—”

“You’ve told them enough to,” Louis cuts through, “idiots like them, they don’t need much encouragement, one little story from a trusted mouth, that’s enough, they were just waiting to find a victim and you basically served me to them on a silver platter.”

Harry bites at the corner of his mouth. “They’re really not that bad. Once you get to know ‘em all.”

“I’m sure they aren’t,” Louis agrees, “to _you_. Because you’ve got— like, like, I don’t fuckin’ know, what’ve you got? Shitloads of coke and booze to go round? Ten-thousand silver spoons stuffed up your—”

“I’m not the only one,” Harry says, stuffing his thumbs into his pockets. “You wouldn’t be here if your parents didn’t have money. None of us would. There are a million cheaper boarding schools in England, and even if your dad was dead-set on sending you all the way up here, there’s still another, cheaper boarding school in relatively close proximity. So don’t, like,” his gaze rolls over Louis’ laptop and his iPhone, “go all reverse snobbery on me when you’re not much better yourself.”

“And yet, you don’t see me going round punching people’s guts in and calling them faggots all the time,” Louis mutters, “oh, and, by the way, the latter is more laughable than hurtful at this point, seeing as you’ve got absolutely no reason what so ever to call me gay other than that you simply don’t have the brain capacity to come up with something different.”

“Right.” Harry hitches his duvet and pillow up once more. “You done yet? This is starting to bore me.”

Louis groans, fighting down the violent urge to tell Harry to fuck off and go drown himself in a mountain of powdered sugar.

“No. Listen,” he sighs exasperatedly, “we’ve got off on the wrong foot and we’ll probably never be best friends or anything, but— if you tell your mates to calm it down with the bullshittery, just enough that I can go about my day in peace and not have to shit and shower at dick o’clock at night, I’ll tell you that you can, ehm,” he scratches at the back of his neck, then throws a hand out toward the bedspread still lying crinkled on the floor, “you can sleep here when you want without having to answer any questions.”

Harry’s eyes narrow, just a little. Louis keeps them pinned, raising his brows until Harry leans back against the door, slowly, cocking his head back. “And you don’t—”

“No.”

“And you won’t—”

“No.”

“And this isn’t—”

“Never.”

Harry nods, mouth closed, crooks of it lowering just a bit. “Hm.”

“M-hm.” Just as Harry opens his mouth to agree to the terms and conditions of the proposal, Louis jumps in; “but you have to tell me why you can’t sleep in your own room.”

Harry’s shoulders fall. “Right.”

“Right, indeed.” Louis sighs, softening up when Harry’s expression does the opposite, “listen, I’ve just got to know that you wont be having crazy screaming night terrors or that breathing thing where you risk suffocating in your sleep. I can’t deal with that, really.”

Harry nods, slowly, face still guarded, arms stiff. “I’m going home after classes today,” he says, “I’ll talk to you when I get back Sunday evening.”

“All right,” Louis leans back a little, still uncertain, “all right.”

Harry nods again, faster this time, then turns, peeks his head out to assess the clearness of the coast, and then walks out, leaving Louis to finally slump back against his headboard, breathing out.

Of course, only a second passes before he pops his big head back in, smile wide, dimpled and fake, and says; “oh, and if you snitch while I’m gone, I’m going to smother you in your sleep. Have a good weekend!”

 

*

 

Louis does, if for no other reason then just because it seems a majority of his worst tormentors have followed their puppeteer’s lead and gone home to mummy for the weekend as well. He expects to have a decent time all weekend, seeing as Niall’s staying round at school with him, like usual.

Saturday night, though, they do find themselves half-baked and all out of alcohol. It’s half past one am and they’re lying on the floor in Louis’ room, staring at the ceiling, feet up on the bed and a paper plate of smuggled chocolate-cake from snack-time between them, bored.

And then Louis comes to think of something. Something utterly, utterly idiotic.

“You wanna get fucked tonight?”

Niall’s eyes shoot open, his head jerking sideways. “Mate, I dunno if the whole ’school faggot’ thing mislead you, but you’re not really my ty—”

“Oh. No. No, god no, fuck. Fuck, _ew_ , no, gross—”

“Okay, all right, I get it, no need to retch.”

Louis slings his feet off of the bed, sits up and spins around on his bum, leaning back against it. “I didn’t mean ‘fucked’ like that. I meant fucked, as in, let’s get fucked. You wanna?”

“Depends,” Niall’s says, eyes narrowing. “What’ve you got? Who sold it to you? If it’s in pill-form and you bought it off Dingleberry Joe by the self-help books in the library then, for the love of god, don’t take it.”

Louis stares at him blankly. Then he pushes off the floor, mutters “be right back” and sneaks out of the room before Niall has a chance to ask him why or what for.

He doesn’t have to walk very far. In fact, he only has to take one step in the darkened hall and over to Harry’s door, gently press the handle and let himself in. If he’d been a stupid person, he’d have grabbed hold of Harry before he left Friday afternoon, he’d have told him _hey, mate, you left your key in my room this morning_ , but he didn’t. Instead, Friday afternoon, just before Harry left, Louis sat quiet on his bed, listening through the wall to Harry’s groans of frustration as he upended his room trying to find the missing keys. In the end, he left with a click of the door and then the plan was complete; Louis had unlimited access to Harry’s room.

To Harry’s stash.

He flicks on the lights and now stands, for the first time, inside of Harry’s room. He’s glanced into it a couple times before, but never for long enough to actually notice a difference between this and his own. It’s the same green walls and dark-red carpets, the same dark wood bed, desk and dresser. The desk is slightly neater than Louis’, no half-drunk, lukewarm cups of tea left standing, no random sheets of important papers lying out. Instead he’s got all his papers pinned up on a cork board and half-eaten packs of gum lying round everywhere. There’s a hamper in the corner, emptied because he takes all his laundry home to mummy every weekend, of course, and posters of various 70’s bands and football hero’s on his wall. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Except, on his nightstand, stands a photo of a woman something out of the ordinary. Quite a beautiful woman, actually. Upon further inspection, though, Louis realises she carries a certain resemblance to someone he very much _wouldn’t_ consider beautiful, if for no other reason then just because his nasty personality prohibits him from being so.

So. That must be the infamous ‘mummy’.

There’s another photo of her alone and then one of her together with Harry, sitting on a bench in the sun in a garden, and then another photo of a little girl and a very little boy, naked in the bathtub together, the boy being Harry, if Louis isn’t wrong.

It doesn’t surprise Louis, really, that Harry’s made his nightstand into his personal mummy-worship altar, but it does surprise him, positively, that Harry actually has left what Louis came looking for in his room. It’s underneath his mattress, packed in three separate plastic bags, inside of a little zip-lock. Lots of it left. More than enough that he won’t notice a line or two gone.

Louis pulls the bag out from under the mattress, but, just as he does, something comes with. A square little slip of paper, flying out and landing by his foot. If it didn’t look like it had something on the other side of it, Louis wouldn’t have bothered picking it up. But, he’s a curious fuck and he’s already stealing coke so why not go through some of Harry’s secret shit too?

He expects it to be a page out of his diary, perhaps a drawing of himself and his mum, hand in hand, walking toward the sunset, happy ever after.

It’s a yearbook photo of a boy Louis’ never seen before. It’s a yearbook photo of an, objectively, handsome boy, kept underneath Harry’s mattress. It’s a photo of a boy _kept underneath Harry’s mattress_.

“Niall. Niall, you have to see this,” Louis hisses, running back into his room and locking the door behind himself. He plops down on the floor, where Niall’s still lying exactly where he was before, gaze trained on one spot in the ceiling, all traces of chocolate-cake erased from the plate between them. Louis’ pretty sure he’s dead, but he’s too riled up about the photo to care. “Niall, look at this.”

Slowly, Niall makes a grumbling noise and moists his mouth. Then he smacks his lips and looks over. “Wha’?”

“Well, eh-- well, for one, I’ve got a bit of something-something.” He pulls out the bag from under his hoodie and plops it down on the empty plate, Niall’s eyes beaming up like Christmas-lights. “But we’ve got to only take a bit and then put it back or I’ll get smothered in my sleep, I’m pretty certain.”

“Yeah, yeah, let me handle it,” Niall mutters, already sitting up, cross-legged, closing Louis’ laptop and carefully drizzling coke out onto it before neatly arranging two fine lines. “Okay. Okay, nice. You sure this isn’t poison, right?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Where’d you get it? Not off Dingleberry—”

“No. Nicked it off Harry Styles.”

Niall stills halfway down, rolled-up pink post-it note at one nostril. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll just put it back after,” Louis says, and Niall’s gaze stays on him for a second, narrowed, then flicks down again, then up, then down again at last. He shrugs a shoulder and dives in.

“But you have to see this,” Louis says, pulling the photo out, “I found this under his mattress.”

Niall sits up again, cocking his head back, eyes screwing shut. Then he opens them again, finally looking at the photo Louis’ holding out.

He blinks.

“Do you know him?”

Niall wipes under his nose with the back of his wrist. “Never seen him before in my life.”

“Oh,” Louis sighs, having hoped it might’ve been someone who went here or used to go here, “isn’t it weird that he keeps a photo of some boy under his mattress?”

Niall shrugs. “Could be his brother or cousin or something.”

“Niall, he looks nothing like Harry. Like, at _all_.”

Niall studies the thin-built dark-haired boy on the photo. He bites his lip. “I don’t know, mate. Probably a summer fling or something.”

“So you think he’s gay? Harry Styles?”

Niall hands the post-it over and leans back against the nightstand. “Wouldn’t make much sense, though, would it?” he mutters, “if he were running round hating on anyone remotely bent and then secretly being a bender himself.”

“I think it’d make perfect sense,” Louis counters, rolling the post-it back up, “if there’s one thing that aggravates a person like Harry Styles, it’s recognising his own biggest shame in someone else.”

“Meaning, you’re gay too, then? Since he recognises it in you?”

Louis barks a laugh, lifting the rolled-up post-it to his nostril. “No, Niall,” he says, dipping down, “it means Harry Styles is both a self-hating bender _and_ equipped with a defective sense of who’s gay too and who isn’t. It’s just sad, really. I pity him.”

“Right.”


	8. Chapter 8

It’s nearly three AM when Charles pulls Harry’s duffel out of the boot and gives his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Think you’re all right now, lad?” he asks, a soft smile spreading over his thin lips. In all the years Charles has driven for his family, even on nights like these, when he’s been called away from his wife at arse o’clock at night to bring a hysterical Harry all the way back up to school one day early, Harry hasn’t ever seen him in a mood. Not even a little one, not even just a smile that didn’t quite reach the eyes.

No, he’s always been gentle with Harry and with mum, always quiet, patient, at their beck and call like it’s something he takes pride in, like it’d go against his own sense of self-respect not to be.

So Harry does feel bad for having screamed his ear off half the trip up here. For having ignored his every well-intended attempt at light-hearted banter the entire last half. For muttering “yeah, fine” without making proper eye-contact now, just grabbing his bag from the old man and trotting away towards the staircase. It jabs him once more, the guilt, when back inside the warm doors of Waterbridge, sheltered from the rain, not yet having heard the car engine re-start. He turns stupidly, sees exactly what he knew he would; Charles waited in the rain for as long as it took Harry to get inside before making the slightest move to get himself back in the warmth of the car.

“You all right, Harry?” one of the staff-members, Mr. O’Connell, asks him. He looks tired, but not puffy, not like he’s just had to rip himself out of bed just to come down and let Harry in. He’s on night-watch then, was probably up anyway, happy to have something to keep himself awake with. It eases Harry’s guilt a little, he supposes, not having ruined yet another person’s night.

“I’m good. Thank you,” Harry musters, insisting on carrying his own bag up. O’Connell follows him up the first flight of stairs just to see that he’s walking straight, that he hasn’t been sent back here stumbling drunk and disoriented like Zayn was once, when things were going badly.

“Night, lad. Get some sleep,” are the last words he hears from O’Connell before he’s left to his own devices and takes the last threeflights of stairs on his own.

It’s quiet here, save for the odd outburst of laughter from a room down the year twelve or thirteen halls. Safe. The pine green walls and the familiar scent of sweaty boy socks and lavender floor wash and _home_ seep in under his hoodie, settle warmly around his chest and help his fingers from shaking too much around the strap of his duffel. When he comes down his hall, there’s no noise to be heard. His boys are all home for the weekend, the few still left probably either asleep, jerking off with their headphones on or quietly smoking a blunt out the window before bed.

There’s no sleeping in sight for Harry tonight, would’ve been if he hadn’t fucked things up so terribly back in Cheshire, but now there isn’t. He’s made his own bed with his terrible decision-making and now he’s got to lie in it, not sleeping one minute till morning.

At least, he thinks with a sigh as he rummages in his bag for his room key, at least there’s that bag of coke under the mattress. His safety net, his failsafe, shielding him from accidental sleep or boutsof depression.

That, of course, is when he realizes it; the key isn’t in his bag. The key isn’t with him at all. He traces his steps, traces them right back to where there’s actually a bit of muffled noise coming from right this moment; Louis Tomlinson’s room.

Without thinking to shove his duffel in his unlocked room first, or get in and shrug his coat off, maybe consider the fact that there’s no reason not to wait till the morning to get the key back, he slides right up to the door of the boy who’s been tormenting him without meaning to for weeks, slams the handle down and shoves it open.

“What,” he shouts without meaning to shout at all, “the fuck.”

On the floor, between a pissdrunk passed-out half-melted blubber of cheese - otherwise known as Niall Horan - and an overhyped, powder-nosed, overly-tan-for-the-season ball of jitters - overwise known as Louis Tomlinson - is a bag. The bag. The bag of _Harry’s_ fucking coke.

“U-oh, eh,” Tomlinson stutters, eyes blowing up twice the size soon as he sees Harry. His huge headphones tumble off his head as he pushes his lax body off the floor and up on his elbows, then nearly falls right back down when he lifts one arm to attempt to wipe the very visible dusting of coke from under his nose. “I— shit.”

Niall, who’s most likely been pronounced legally dead hours ago, doesn’t so much as stir.

“Is that my fucking coke?!” Harry hears himself shout.

It doesn’t feel like a decision, like last week when he got so frustrated with Tomlinson for thinking he had, maybe knowing he had and attempting to take advantage of, some sort of power over Harry, it doesn’t feel like trying to establish dominance. It just feels out of his control, like when he shoved Tomlinson in the hall for trying to be nice, like when he beat him for mentioning mum, like when he lost all semblance of self-esteem earlier today.

He just screams. And screams. And screams.

By the end of it he’s got Tomlinson balled up in a corner by his bed, arms up to guard his face like he’s bracing himself for the impending punch, like Harry’s likely to do that to him over a stupid bag of coke, like Harry’s already on his way to do it and— fuck, maybe he is.

If this were any other night, any other week, any other year, he thinks he wouldn’t. He thinks he’d hate the sort of person who’d scream a new kid into a corner over something he could buy a million more grams of like nothing, then proceed to slam his fist into the kid’s upheld arms trying to get to his much too pretty face, but— but it isn’t. It’s tonight, after today, which makes this one minor inconvenience the straw that broke the camel’s back. That might break Tomlinson’s nose.

 

 

*

 

He thinks this might be it. He doesn’t know why or how or what he did in order for everything to fall in to place in the most unfortunate way possible, but he knows that he thinks this might be it. This might be the moment that Harry Styles shows himself to not just be a fucked-up insomniac with a coke-habit and violent tendencies, but an actual full-blown sociopath with blood-lust.

“Please, please, fuck, fuck, please,” he’s chanting, like a little kid, utterly pathetic and utterly unashamed, trying to keep his battered arms up to save his face. They’ve been hit at least a dousin times each, hard, and in between that he’s taken a blow to his cheekbone and his temple, and he’s shaking, he thinks he might’ve pissed himself a little, he’s crumbled up between his bed and his nightstand, which has been shoved three feet to the left by the force of Harry Styles’ wrath. “Please, stop, stop, mate, mate, mate—”

Just then, Harry Styles manages to get a grip of both his wrists at once, hard enough that he shouts at the feel of huge thumbs digging into fresh bruises, and rip his arms away from his face. Harry isn’t screaming anymore, isn’t yelling incoherently or even hissing at Louis, he’s just panting hard out through his teeth, staring at him like he isn’t even really there. Like he could be an animal, a pestilence, even just an inanimate object, like it wouldn’t matter much if the entirety of his face got crushed to dust.

His face is red, burgundy almost, teeth bared and tightly shut, and there’s a vein in his neck threatening to pop any second. His eyes are there too, big and bulging and fixed right on Louis, but then, in a way, they aren’t really there at all. They aren’t there at all and that’s the part that scares Louis the most.

This guy might actually kill me.

“Please, mate, mate, mate, don’t, mate,” Louis screams on no voice, “mate, stop, please, mate—”

Harry lets go of a wrist and lifts his fist in the same breath and Louis squeezes his eyes shut, bracing himself and then—

Then there’s a loud _umph_. And then nothing at all.

For a second, Louis awaits the impact of delayed pain, considers the possibility of having died already, but nothing happens and so eventually he opens his eyes and finds that he’s still very much alive.

So is Niall, apparently, because he’s got his back to Louis and his kneeling over Harry Styles. Harry’s been shoved back against the door, forcefully, and Niall’s hands are digging into his shoulders, holding him there.

“Calm down, calm the fuck down, what the _fuck_ are you doing, mate, look at yourself,” Niall’s lamenting, and Harry’s just lying there, staring at him, breathing so fast he might be hyperventilating, “look at yourself, Harry, you’re fucking— you’re _no_ fucking better.”

He lifts a fist and Harry doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t even attempt to guard himself.

But Niall doesn’t punch him. He just reaches the fist down to one of Harry’s shaking hands and presses something into it.

It takes a few seconds of rapid chest-lifting before Harry actually opens his hand and looks down at whatever Niall gave him. When he does look, he only looks for a second before he flinches away and curls his hand back up. Then he just grimaces, like he might cry.

Niall backs up a little. “You’re no fucking better,” he says again, voice hard like Louis didn’t even think it could be, “you’re no fucking better if you keep at it like this.” He slaps his hands off on his thighs with a sigh and gets up, kicks around Harry to get to the door. “Sort yourself the fuck out, all right?” He stops in the door, looking down at the pathetic mess that’s left on the floor. “All _right_?”

Harry swallows audibly, pushes his jaw out and then nods up at him, just like that. Nods like a pliant child.

“Good,” Niall says, and then leaves with a slam of the door.

The room falls silent after that.

Louis doesn’t know what kind of insanity it is that’s possessed him, but he doesn’t immediately get up to run for help. He doesn’t even try to leave just to save himself from the clear danger of being left in a room alone with Harry Styles. He just lies there, between the nightstand and his bed, breathing. Breathing until his breathing’s come down from that of utmost terror, until Harry’s has come down from the grips of uncontrollable rage, until they end up breathing in unison.

At that point, or maybe minutes later, he isn’t sure, he does get up. He gets into bed and he closes his eyes.

It’s another minute or so, of lying back against his pillow, rubbing the bridge of his nose and cherishing the fact that it’s still exactly the same shape as it was when he woke this morning, before Harry starts to move. He crawls around quietly, fiddles with the ziplock of coke left on the floor, then gets up with a groan and heads for the door.

Before he’s out of it, he stops, waits for a heavy few seconds of silence, then finally says; “I’m not just this, you know. I’m not this at all, really. I am, I, uhm… I _am_ better. Really. Than this.” He pauses, just for a second, then adds, “I _am_ sorry, I, I— I _am_ sorry that you’re around me. I— I really am.”

With that, he leaves, closing the door carefully behind him.

 

  
*

 

“Harry?”

He still doesn’t know, is the thing. He still doesn’t know what kind of insanity it is that’s possessed him, which is why he’s here now, still insane, still up at four AM Sunday morning, standing in the doorway of the guy he thought might kill him less than two hours earlier.

Harry’s crumbled up in bed, duvet wrapped around himself, open ziplock of coke on his nightstand, little slip of something in his hand. He crumbles it up in his fist soon as Louis walks in.

“Yeah?” he says, hardly a breath.

In that moment, he doesn’t look like a killer, or even a violent person at all. He doesn’t look like someone to be scared of, someone to hate all-consumingly, or even just a little. He doesn’t look anything like the guy Louis’ known him to be for all the little time that he’s known him, full of anger, hatred, unjustified and utterly unfair. In that moment, curled up in a duvet with tear-stained cheeks and wobbling lips and fingers that tremble too hard to keep closed around the little slip of paper Niall handed him earlier, he looks like someone Louis doesn’t even know the half of.

In that moment, Louis knows what that little slip of paper is.

“What you just did, that was absolutely insane,” he says, “that was absolutely unacceptable in every possible way and I should go straight down and tell on you to staff, I should get you kicked out of here if I could, I should make every possible move to make sure not to put myself in a position like the one I am in right now, standing here alone in a room with you.”

Harry nods, lips pressed tight to keep from wobbling.

“But…” Louis sighs, eyes gliding over the bit of white under Harry’s nose, the ziplock on his nightstand, the family photo’s surrounding it, “I guess I’m insane too in some ways. No way near the way you are, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a violent fucking maniac or anything, but— but I suppose my point is, is that… is that you don’t know my crazy and I sure as fuck don’t know yours. All I know is that— is that you’ve got a photo of some kid in your hand there that’s meant something to you, enough that— that you do have your reasons.”

Harry swallows, hand twitching around the yearbook photo of the boy Louis doesn’t know.

“And I don’t need to know them. I just need to know that— I just need to know that you’re not without them, I suppose. I just need to— I just need to not have so much shit going on around me. I’m not asking for friendship, Harry, I’m not asking for anything of anyone around me, I just need to be left to function all right, by myself. That’s all I ever need.”

“Okay, I—”

“So,” Louis steps back again, sighing. His arms and his head hurts and it’s quiet all around him, but it’s been so noisy everywhere since he came that it still doesn’t feel like enough. “I just need you to come to my room and sleep on the floor or whatever, and then for you to be decent enough not to bother me too much in the daytime if you do. I just need you to function enough to let me function on my own from now on, okay?”

He looks at Harry again properly, for the first time since he started his rant.

He’s sitting up straight, eyes wide and attentive, fingernails dug into his own palms. “Yeah, I’ll, yeah, I—” he says, nodding through every word, “yeah. Thank you. Sorry. Tha- I— thank you.”

Louis sighs, dropping his chin. “Yeah. Okay.” He sighs again, then clicks his tongue and leaves Harry to gather his shit on his own.

 

*

 

If Harry had any sort of self-preservational skills in him, he wouldn’t be doing this. He wouldn’t be dragging his mattress out of his room and into Louis Tomlinson’s room and setting up camp for the night as far away from the bed as possible. If he’d learnt anything at all these last couple weeks about Louis Tomlinson and himself, and what damage those two things put together do to the latter, he wouldn’t be in here right now, lying on the floor listening to the soft hum of Louis’ breathing as he sleeps.

But he is. He is, because he _is_ himself and because who that is is someone he can’t respect at all.

There are more detrimental things at stake, he supposes, like sleep-loss and the dangerous effects of coke-usage as a means of daily survival, there are things like those that he can use as excuses to rationalize his own lack of self-restraint. He’ll probably regret it in the morning.

Louis Tomlinson would probably regret right now, if he knew how much he had to do with what happened earlier today. If he knew how much he had to do with everything lately. But he doesn’t, Harry reasons, nor does he want to, and maybe that’s part of why Harry feels comfortable enough to fall asleep right here on his floor tonight. 

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is pointerbrotherblog :)


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